


All Manner of Pleasant Fruits

by Trigonometrical



Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Body Horror, Communication, Explicit Sexual Content, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Feelings, M/M, Magic, Mandrakes, Meet the Family, Near Death Experiences, Sharing a Bed, Supernatural Elements, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:18:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 41,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21920299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trigonometrical/pseuds/Trigonometrical
Summary: Pat drapes his right arm over the mic stand for support. “Thanks for—uh. Helping me out there.”“I don’t know what Idid,” Brian says. It’s louder than he meant, almost a shout. Pat winces. “Pat, you almostdied. I—what’s going on?”“I don’t know if I can say,” Pat says softly, quickly. Ominously. “It’ll—it’ll change. Things.”“Things?”“Things,” Pat replies. “Everything, really.”Brian could fucking pull his hair out.
Relationships: Brian David Gilbert/Patrick Gill
Comments: 73
Kudos: 105
Collections: Polygolidays Gift Exchange 2019!





	1. Part 1 - 1/2

**Author's Note:**

  * For [segmentcalled](https://archiveofourown.org/users/segmentcalled/gifts).

> Thanks everyone for the cheerleading, whether you knew what you were cheerleading or not! I'll add more detailed notes after the Big Reveal ;)

The streaming room has never felt so stuffy and musty-nasty as it does now, two grown men coughing and sniffling all over the place. 

Well, Brian isn’t so much expectorating as he is inwardly dying from the shingles. But Pat is just. Phlegm all over the place. Every time Pat coughs, Brian winces at the disgusting _wetness_, the way Pat seems to hack up a lung and swallow it back down in the following breath.

“Seriously, dude, we _don’t _have to stream tonight,” Brian says, idly fiddling with the crack in his phone case. “Like, we both feel like dog _shit_, and Tara would understand if we called it off last minute.”

Brian loves Gill and Gilbert, even if it had cost Polygon a frankly _alarming _number of subscribers. Of course, both Tara and Pat had assured Brian that the stream numbers were good, engagement was high, they weren’t doing anything wrong—even though it sure felt like they had. But he’s happy to not stream every once in a while and take a normal evening at home. Tara wouldn’t even be upset at their hourly requirements, which Brian had been more than making up recently anyway.

Hence, you know. The shingles. Brought about by stress.

Plus, Brian can imagine Tara’s withering stare perfectly, asking to clarify if Pat managed to cough on _all _the equipment or just the really expensive stuff.

Pat shakes his head, his hair falling limply in front of his eyes. He looks absolutely miserable, his skin pale almost to the point of matching his button-down, and his eyelids droop closed for longer and longer intervals after each blink. Brian supposes that his own shingles are on the way out, but even still—Pat looks worse than Brian, and Brian literally feels like the nerves on half his abdomen are on fire. 

They’re really a pair.

“Gotta content,” Pat says gruffly. He squints and moves away from the mic to take a rattling breath, slow and purposeful like he’s trying not to cough. _Again_. “We’re. Professional gamers.”

“Patrick.”

He’s so damn self-effacing, Brian could scream. Pat’s tendency to minimize his own suffering, whether it be from actual illness or from eating too many pepperonis, is maybe the only thing that bothers Brian about Pat. Well, that and his broody eyes, and his long neck, and how good he looks in a pair of dark wash jeans.

But those are bothersome for a different reason. 

“Seriously Brian,” Pat says in assurance—though it’s hardly _assuring _when Pat’s skin is dry and yellow-tinged. “I’ll be fine, just gotta chug this tea and then I’ll be cured.”

Brian eyes Pat warily and adjusts his glasses. “I’m not gonna tell you no, ‘cause I’m not your mom,” Brian says, “but I am _very disappointed in you young man_.”

Pat laughs, and honestly, Brian is the slightest millimeter assured when the laugh doesn’t morph into a chest-racking cough. “Did I tell you my mom was supposed to visit this week?” Pat asks, unscrewing the cap to his tea.

“Oh really?”

Pat shakes his head and takes a swig. “She _and _my- my grandma were gonna make a road trip out of it, but I told ‘em last night we’d have to reschedule for when I was feeling better.”

“That blows,” Brian says, twitching a smile in Pat’s general direction. “Love a good grandma road trip.”

“Just absolute octogenarian mayhem.”

“Coming to the Switch Fall 2018,” Brian jokes. 

Pat grins, his tongue poking in the corner of his mouth. 

Brian wishes he wouldn’t.

Brian glances away, across the room, down at his phone for something really urgent and important to do. Tweet of the Week, right.

There’s silence for a couple minutes as Brian scrolls through his Twitter bookmarks. He refreshes himself on what absolute hell he’d picked for the week. Pat likes to go in blind so he can’t obsess over what he’s going to do for each segment for too long, or plan them in advance, but Brian likes to know exactly what he’s getting into. Even if he changes his mind at the last minute.

He replies with a thumbs-up to Laura’s text in the roomie group chat, a screenshot of the _shingle jingle _which had at some point received 420 likes. And then he responds with a _! _reaction to Jonah’s message, _that’s the weed number!_. 

Pat clears his throat in a way that suggests it hadn’t been the first time, whoopsie doodle. He’s looking at Brian with an expression that would probably be bemused, if his eyes weren’t bloodshot and if his face weren’t somehow stark white and blotchy-flushed at the same time. “Kids these days and their screens,” Pat remarks sadly. As though he’s not surrounded by at least five communally-used internet-enabled devices—all of which he’s logged into as _pizza_suplex _with the passwords saved for optimum security.

Brian sighs. “I’m sorry Producer Pat, I can’t help being a child of the digital revolution.”

“That’s Live Producer Pat to _you_,” Pat says with a haughty, maybe-English accent. But he drops out of it just as quickly when he adds, “Oh also, it’s like ten minutes after when we’re supposed to stream.”

“God_dammit_ Pat,” Brian says. He waggles his head and shifts his weight on the couch, moving his phone to the cushion beside him. “How do we do this every fuckin’ week?”

“This is like the one week we have an excuse,” Pat says, shrugging, very calm at being ten minutes late. It makes sense that Brian is the one who got shingles. Pat presses some buttons and moves the cursor into the corner of his laptop screen, doing a complicated juggle with the laptop and the couch cushion and also his tea, good god.

As the Gill and Gilbert theme music ramps up, Brian absolutely does not do it in a visual space, but he does _think _the theater warmup that Ryan and Sharpay do in _High School Musical_. He does some lip trills, closes his eyes, and gets in the fucking _zone_.

When he blinks his eyes open to refocus them, there are only five seconds before the feed goes live. Brian schools his face into just the worst, grossest, saddest scowl he can manage. Which, to be fair, isn’t that hard to do when he thinks about his shingles for longer than one-point-five seconds. And since he’s constantly in pain, he’s constantly thinking about his shingles.

Mm, illness.

Brian whines and scrunches his nose when the video goes live. “Paa-_aat_. I’m sick, Pat.”

Pat coughs. They realize there’s no audio. They try again.

It’s not their strongest opening, but unfortunately, it’s also not their weakest opening. By far. It’s at least on brand, whatever the Gill and Gilbert brand _is_. 

“We’re tired and we’re sick,” Brian hears himself say, nasal and obnoxious. “I’m—I’m just getting over the shingles. I have _one pill_ left to take.” He cocks his head and raises his eyebrows. “The hardest pill to swallow is the one that is me saying goodbye to my shingles.”

“That’s gonna- that’s gonna get rid of the last shingle,” Pat says with a grin.

“That’s gonna- yep, they pop off. It’s a—it’s a one-for-one, one-in-one-out situation.”

Pat ad-libs something about the shingles popping off, but Brian doesn’t really hear him while he massages the bridge of his nose. “Yeah it’s uh, very satisfying.” 

“What do you do with the shingle when it pops off?”

“Uh, bury it,” Brian replies sagely. Which honestly sounds like it could be a deleted scene from the _shingle jingle _video. All the rows of shingle shingles in his backyard like a cemetery. Could have done that one instead of carrying Zuko under the bridge, ‘cause like. Damn, the scratches on his opposite side hadn’t necessarily hurt the shingles, but they also hadn’t _helped_.

“Y-you you ever think of those- those jokes, of those hot shingles in your area?”

How long Pat’s been sitting on that one, Brian could never know. Probably since the appearance of the first shingle, lying in wait for the perfect opportunity. Though Brian’s not sure he would call this the _perfect opportunity_. Or a joke? But he smiles despite himself because damn Pat’s stupid grin when he glances over at Brian. Shingles delirium, indeed.

Pat coughs again, and Brian glances to make sure he’s not coughing up blood like a character in a Victorian novel. Brian doesn’t know if it’s translating through the stream, but the coughs sound nasty and deep like Pat’s got a real gen-yoo-wine sickness instead of just the summertime sniffles. 

“What’s your—what’s your illness, Pat?”

“My illness is,” Pat starts, then changes gears. “I dunno. I’m getting sick. My throat’s starting to go. I was streaming last night and I was talking like a- like a regular person, then all of a sudden _the throat stopped working _and I started coughing. And then I started _sneezing_,” he adds, which to Brian sounds like the saddest of all.

“So with that in mind,” Pat says, brushing his hair out of his face, “we’re gonna do a special stream for ourselves where we try to take care of each other a little bit. Because when you’re ill, nothing makes ya feel better . . . than a little TLC.”

“So we’re playing the most TLC game we can think of—”

Brian can’t say that he’s thrilled about _Warhammer: Vermintide _as a concept—it’s not the type of game he prefers by a mile, but it’s definitely thematically appropriate. For one, there’s uh, sickness in it. _And _they’re battling people with the plague (“We can fight back in the same way our own white blood cells are fighting back our own illnesses”). But in pretty much every other way, Brian hopes it’s not a 1:1 comparison, because boy howdy do they suck at this game. Even when they aren’t making goofs or “chatting” with their party NPCs, they’re not playing what anyone could reasonably consider _well_. Pat, at least, plays games similar to this in his free time or extra Twitch gig, but Brian’s flying by the seat of his plague pants. He would have rather they’d done some sort of _Stardew Valley_ challenge about visiting the doctor or staying out too late harvesting stuff, but. Ya win some, ya lose some. 

By the time they get sidetracked talking about whether feet are allowed on Twitch, Brian’s got multiple band-aids all over his person, and Pat’s got a healthy collection on his face, too. It’s a nice break from the game, thinking about foot stuff—which is, Brian thinks, maybe the only time in his life he’s thrilled to talk about foot stuff in an audible space. It’s a topic that would normally excite Pat (_hypothetically_, he always adds, a caveat like he does when _piss _comes up), except Pat’s deffo flagging midway through the stream. Brian had hoped the unnamed tea and video games would make Pat feel better, like Brian’s standard home-sick-from-school routine, but Pat looks worse and worse as time goes on. Sure, he’s doing a fairly good job of it, distracting from the pallor of his skin by talking about how he almost got banned for showing his tootsies. But when Brian takes over to tell a story about _respiratorboy85_—that he _definitely _should not be telling, he realizes, like ten seconds into the story—Pat uses the opportunity to sink down into the couch and toe off his shoes out of the frame. He looks absolutely miserable, like he’s holding it together only for the sake of the stream. A true gamer.

_Maybe it’s the shingles delirium_, Pat had said to Brian earlier. Brian had laughed off his weird attempts at jokes, but like, damn

They end the stream after 74 minutes and Brian doesn’t feel guilty about an abrupt ending because Pat looks _awful_. His hands are shaking where they’re draped over the mic stand, and his leg is twitching hard enough that it’s probably visible in the shot.

“Okay friends, we’ll- we’ll see ya next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel,” Brian ad-libs, laughing as he stutters through the bit. “Except it’s not a channel at all—is it a channel on Twitch, Pat?”

“I don’t know, Brian,” Pat says tonelessly, and _okay_, time to wrap it up.

“We’ll see ya on the possibly-channel,” Brian says quickly, a nervous laugh bleeding through his voice. “Have a good night!”

Pat clicks the stream off and slumps to the couch like a muppet whose handler has gone home for the day. He coughs and curls in on himself, the motion wracking his back as it bounces against the couch cushion.

“Jesus, Pat,” Brian says, pressing the back of his hand to Pat’s forehead like he’s checking for a fever. Pat’s skin is _incredibly_ dry and flaky, like if Brian blew too hard Pat would turn into a pile of sand. He only gets a brief touch before Pat yanks his head away like he’d been scalded. “Are you, like, okay?”

“Not in the slightest,” Pat replies. He tries to laugh, or at least Brian _thinks _he tries to laugh, but it just results in more nasty coughs. “No, ‘m fine, I just gotta go to bed, and tomorrow I’ll be—_whoa._”

Pat tries to stand up—_get away from you_, Brian’s mind whispers—but he barely lifts himself off the couch before his body drops like a lead weight. Pat almost rolls off the couch, save for Brian hopping in at the last second to shove his body back into a semi-seated position. 

He’s, oh god. He’s out cold.

Pat’s still breathing, his chest rising and falling, which is one of the only things Brian remembers from the mandatory CPR training he’d done when he worked at a climbing gym. Pulse: even. Airway: probably not obstructed, since they hadn’t eaten any cookies or pepperonis in this one. But oh _god_, Brian looks around the room for something, anything to tell him what to do. Clayton’s gone home, there’s maybe someone like two floors down that could help, but what if Pat’s _dying_? 

Brian knows Pat isn’t dying, but it sure feels like _Brian_ might if he can’t get his brain to string together two helpful thoughts.

Okay, breathe. This certainly isn’t doing good things for his shingles.

He could call an ambulance, but there’s no fucking way Pat has met his deductible on the company health insurance plan, and he definitely doesn’t have a thousand bucks to pay for an ambulance in the hellscape that is the US healthcare system. Brian could call a Lyft instead, but how to get Pat to the elevator when he’s like a sack of potatoes? A Pat-shaped sack that’s taller than Brian. There’s no way Brian could carry him anywhere unless it was via piggyback ride or something. But Brian doesn’t think Pat’s in a piggyback sort of mood.

“Pat, I need ya to wake up, bud,” Brian says, snapping his fingers in front of Pat’s nose. “Does this work like it does in the movies? God, I hope it’s not like that thing where you see people performing CPR wrong in movies, like where someone finds a kid choking and does CPR for some reason and busts a rib, like _oh actually I would have been better choking, thank you, now you’ve punctured my lu-_”

Pat sputters a cough, soft and fragile, but Brian could kiss the sound for how happy he feels. It takes like a hundred years for Pat’s eyes to blink open and blearily meet Brian’s own. “Oh no,” are Pat’s first words, and Brian’s just freaked out enough that he can’t laugh, even if Pat clearly wants him to. Pat coughs hard, two dry, raspy coughs that shake his prone body again. 

“Pat, Pat, do you know—we’ve gotta get you to a d-doctor? Or a hospital?”

“No!” Pat exclaims. He lunges out with a final burst of strength and grabs Brian around the wrist, surprisingly hard given his state. It makes Brian gasp, the chill-dry of his fingers curling around Brian’s skin. “No, can’t—can’t go to a doctor.”

“Is it about the money?” Brian asks. “I can get an Uber or—or a Lyft, I guess, they have fairer wages, but we—”

Pat squeezes Brian’s wrist hard enough that his nails dig into the skin. “Not the money, Brian I— I know what’s wrong with m-me, and the hospital won’t help.”

Well that’s certainly ominous. Brian gets that feeling of _wrongness _in his gut, the one he’d had last summer right before he got mugged, the one he had in Scotland when he decided not to cliff dive into treacherous, rocky waters. But he pushes onward because, well. It’s Pat. 

“Can _I _help?” Brian asks. He tugs his hand out of Pat’s grip and rubs at the worried skin. “Pat, you—you gotta tell me what’s wrong. Let me help you.

“I think you’re gonna have to,” Pat says sadly. “Brian, I—” 

Pat trails off and lets his eyes wander away from Brian’s face, to stare somewhere into the middle distance. Normally, Brian wouldn’t let the silence hang that long. He’d cut in with a joke, a self-deprecating comment, a streaming idea. Anything to pull Pat out of one of his funks. But this one seems different. Bone-deep and weary and filled with dread. 

Pat’s eyes water behind his glasses, his skin _so _dry that the tears leave visible tracks down his cheeks. Brian wants to reach up and wipe them away but he and Pat don’t _do _that, for all that they casually touch each other. Instead, Brian folds his shaking hands into his lap, tries to will them to be still.

“I’m sorry,” Pat says, soft and quick. “I’ll explain everything later, but I- I’m really gonna, uh, gonna need you to trust me.”

“I trust you,” Brian says, emphatic. It was true before whatever the hell this is, and it’s certainly true now. “What do you need?”

Pat takes a wheezy, shaky breath, and meets Brian’s eyes again. They’re red-rimmed and so frightened—of? Of Brian? Before Brian has time to really process that, Pat rushes out:

“I need to drink some of your blood so I don’t fucking die.”

Brian’s vision tunnels, and though he had tried to school his face into something that wouldn’t betray shock at whatever the fuck Pat would say, he really had not mentally prepared for _drinking your blood_. Brian does the quickest, most purposeful once-over down Pat’s body he’s ever done. To Brian’s untrained eye, Pat doesn’t look like a vampire. No sharp teeth. No bloodlust other than just _straight up _asking for blood. Pale, but not like, vampire pale. Sick pale. Like if Brian keeps stalling, Pat will be _dead_, pale. 

“How—” Brian starts, his voice shaking, “how much?”

Pat wheezes again. “Just a few drops, it’s—it should be good, please hurry?” 

Brian doesn’t wait for any more instruction; he bolts off the streaming room couch and dashes into the Vox kitchenette-breakroom-chillzone. Brian throws open the miscellaneous drawer and grabs a paring knife from under a plastic soup ladle, barely thinking about it. He rushes back to the streaming room carrying the knife with all proper safety protocols in place—the knife curled into his hand, blade down, to ensure he doesn’t fall and accidentally stab himself. As though he’s not about to intentionally stab himself. At least this way he won’t fall and puncture his spleen or something on the way to let Pat _drink his blood_.

Pat looks the same as he had when Brian left, which is a decent sign but certainly not _great. _He cracks open an eye when Brian sits on the couch and displays the knife, but doesn’t say anything else. It feels either like a pointed cue that Pat can’t even _speak_, he feels so bad, oh jeez. Or that all of that is true, _plus _Brian needs to get this show on the road. 

He sucks a deep breath and holds the knife to his palm. It feels like a knife. That he’s about to stab himself with. Ack. Brian presses the edge into his palm, grits his teeth, and is about to make a slice when Pat squeaks out, “_Brian!_”

“_What?_”

“Not—” Pat coughs, “never cut your palm, lotsa ‘portant stuff there. Just—your finger?”

Oh. Of course. That makes way more sense. Definitely would have been Action Hero Brian’s CPR moment, Pat dying as Brian bleeds out because he saw someone do a cool stunt in a movie. Brian adjusts course. That makes way more sense. Definitely would have been Brian’s CPR moment, Pat dying as Brian bleeds all over the dang place. He closes his eyes and holds the pointed tip of the knife to his fingerprint, then grimaces. Just like slicing through an avocado. Or a carrot. Or any produce that’s not his _human finger_.

His brain screams _hey maybe don’t!!! _but Brian ignores that, gasping as the blade cuts into his finger. It only takes the slightest bit of pressure to make blood well up around the blade of the knife like a gnarly paper cut. 

“Now wh—_Patrick_, I—”

Pat swallows, hard, and fights to keep his eyes open. “Think about how you want to h-help me,” Pat says. “Focus on the pain in your finger and send me your th-thoughts and prayers or whatever.”

Brian’s never experienced gallows humor from someone this close to the gallows, but it makes him snort despite the absolute dire straits they’re in. Now he gets it. 

He breathes deeply from his diaphragm and listens to the pulse of his body. How the pinprick in his finger jolts at the edge of his awareness like a particularly annoying housefly buzzing about. How the tiny cut hurts but it isn’t _painful _per se—but he’d take a thousand tiny cuts like this if it meant Pat would feel better. Or maybe he’d sell his prized possession if it meant Pat could have a set of combs for Christmas, but honestly the first one was more poetic.

Brian flings his eyes open. The blood is starting to dribble down his finger, toward his palm. He holds it up in the harsh studio light, and Pat blinks blearily up at it. “Now I’m—” Pat says, his voice weak as he barely musters the strength to cough, “—now hold your finger over my mouth.”

Brian holds his finger over Pat’s mouth, twists so his fingerprint faces down, the drops of blood aided by gravity. One falls slowly into Pat’s mouth, but when that seems to be all that immediately springs forth, Pat groans and reaches up for Brian’s hand. His flailed movements don’t quite connect, but Brian gets the gist. So good at reading Pat’s body language, he is. Brian uses his free hand to squeeze near his second knuckle, and four more quick drops spill out of his finger and onto Pat’s slack tongue. 

_Please work, please work_, he thinks, watching for the bloodlust to hit Pat, for _something _to happen. 

There’s nothing for a few long, tense moments, and then Pat coughs loudly again and sits up—_sits up!_—though he’s still doubled over and retching. Probably from drinking the _blood_, Brian thinks wildly as he grabs a tissue from the box on the floor. 

Pat accepts the tissue with trembling fingers. He coughs into it, a nasty, wet cough that sounds like music to Brian’s ears because Pat’s _sitting up _and has the strength to cough that hard and gross. Brian expects to see some sort of blood in the tissue _now_, surely, like a tuberculosis patient-cum-literary-device. But when Pat pulls the tissue away from his face, Brian catches a hint of something nuclear green folded up in the tissue before Pat crumbles it into a ball and tosses it onto the floor.

Pat uncurls his body from its hunched-over position and leans into the back of the couch, closing his eyes and humming like he’s trying to savor the taste of a delicious meal. Hm. His color brightens, the pink returning to his cheeks in a more natural flush than the sickly pallor from before. He could be meditating or channeling energy or something. Brian doesn’t know. But as Pat starts to regain his strength, the shock of him _almost dying _starts to wear off.

“Uh, hey Pat?” Brian asks. His voice cracks, comes out shakier than he thought it would. “Hey, hey, _Pat_?”

Pat grimaces and flinches like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. He blinks out of his trance. “Hey Bri,” he says weakly, like his voice still isn’t fully back, like he’d just woken up from a Rip Van Winkle sitch or something. “Any—” He clears his throat, looking sheepish. “Any chance you’ll forget that?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Ah.”

Pat opens his mouth to say something but frowns and changes course. “Can I—a couple more drops? Then I think. Should be good,” Pat adds uneasily. 

Without hesitation, Brian holds out his finger. Pat grips it with his hand, already more lifelike and warm to the touch than before. He pinches and squeezes out three more drops onto his outstretched tongue, his breath cascading over Brian’s palm in a way that makes Brian’s arm hair prickle. It’s good, and Brian has a sneaking suspicion it would be even _better _if Brian had any fucking idea what was going on.

Pat smacks his lips and reaches for his Unnamed Tea, opens the cap with less-shaky fingers, takes a long swig that causes his throat to bob. “Thanks for,” Pat says, gesturing vaguely with the tea bottle. He drapes his right arm over the mic stand for support. “Thanks for—uh. Helping me out there.”

“I don’t know what I _did_,” Brian says. It’s louder than he meant, almost a shout. Pat winces. “Pat, you almost _died_. I—what’s going on?”

“I don’t know if I can say,” Pat says softly, quickly. Ominously. “It’ll—it’ll change. Things.”

“_Things_?”

“Things,” Pat replies. “Everything, really.”

Brian could fucking pull his hair out. Instead, he rubs his palms over his cheeks, drags them down until it pulls at the skin under his eyes. His last relationship ended because of vague conversations clogging up the gullyworks between them, lots of feelings were hurt because one person needed something and didn’t say, the other said something they didn’t mean. Brian’s over it, even at the ripe old age of 24. He needs people to just say what they _fucking _mean.

And yet. Someone hedging around _I need you to call more often and make more time for me _is a little different than _let me explain why I just drank your blood like a mosquito_. Same in principle, perhaps, but certainly not in execution. Besides, Pat’s already trusted Brian with a lot of personal shit since starting Gill and Gilbert. It’s impossible not to spend that much time together without getting some of the Patrick Lore. His messy divorce, his broken trust in his friends, his distant relationship with his family back in Maine. Brian takes a deep breath like his therapist always suggests, thinks of some positive reframes. Silver linings. If Pat is nervous to tell Brian—Pat, who within their first week of meeting told Brian all about his secret social media accounts he uses just to exist on the internet like a normal fucking person—then it’s probably a big deal.

And since Pat looks like he’s about to throw up from nervousness, finally not from lingering illness, it must be a fuckin’ huge deal. Brian figures he can throw Pat a bone. Grease up them gullyworks. Some sort of metaphor about making yourself vulnerable to help someone else feel vulnerable—Brian doesn’t know, he hasn’t done a group therapy session in years. So he says:

“I’m trans.”

Pat blinks, snaps his mouth closed. “What?”

“You seemed like you were about to trust me with your Big Secret, so I figured I should do the same,” Brian says, gesturing toward his whole body with the sweep of his palm. “I mean, mine’s not a secret, but I don’t really shout it from the rooftops. So, yeah.”

“Oh, rad,” Pat says simply. “I’m a mandragora.”

“What?”

“What?”

Brian huffs as the cogs turn in his brain. “What do you mean, _what_?” he asks. He shoves his hands under his thighs so he can stop picking at the loose skin around his cuticles. “A mandragora?”

Pat looks guilty and stares at the door like he’s waiting for someone to burst in and yell at him for being. Whatever that is. “You know, like the plant?” he asks, still not looking at Brian.

“The plant.”

Pat grimaces, making some of the band-aids on his cheeks start to peel away from his skin. It’s ghoulish. “Yeah, uh. Like a mandrake?”

“And you’re—”

“One of them, yes.”

“Hm.”

A fuckin’ huge deal, indeed. Brian’s brain leaves the building entirely. It’s not a particularly _great _feeling. Not bad or negative, but definitely not great. Maybe, honestly, leaning a bit toward _bad _if he thinks about it too hard. “Pat you’re—” he starts, then tilts his head. “You’re a _plant_?”

Pat grimaces again. One of the band-aids completely falls off, slips down Pat’s shoulder and onto the couch. “Sort of. I mean my distant ancestors were plants, but now w- we’re- we’re, uh, sort of our own. Thing.” 

Brian can feel his eyes bugging out of his head. “What.”

“Brian, please I’m—I’m gonna, like, you look halfway to staking me or calling the cops—”

“I would _never_.”

“—and I’m freaking out,” Pat adds, all in one breath, “and I really, really need you to confirm you’re not about to- to like. Go all _Frankenstein _on me.”

“Don’t you mean Frankenstein’s monster?” Brian asks, truly unable to help himself, like his mouth’s separate from the five-alarm fire blazing in his brain.

“No, I mean _Frankenstein_,” Pat spits, “as in, an angry mob coming after a peaceful dude minding his goddamn business.”

Brian’s stomach does a bad sort of flip, like a gymnast missing the balance beam and tumbling to the ground. _Thanks for helping me_, Pat had said, and here Brian is being the most unhelpful. Supportive friend, he is not. “Sorry, I—you’re right, sorry,” Brian says, ducking his head. There’s silence for a beat too long before Brian adds, nervous, “I don’t even know where I would buy a torch or a pitchfork in lower Manhattan.”

Pat huffs, his lips twitching like he wants to smile but he’s still a little pissed. Brian doesn’t blame him. He’d be pissed, too.

Brian makes a _go on_ gesture. “Okay, Pat Gill,” he says. “Tell me about how your great-uncle photosynthesized.” 

Pat does laugh, this time, just a soft exhalation as he rolls his eyes. “It’s not, uh—it’s not quite that simple,” he says, turning to face Brian on the couch. Pat tucks his heels up under himself and settles in for what feels like the long haul. “I mean, there’s like mandrakes all the way down, dude. In- in some ancient Greek texts and also the Old Testament. But also, some scholars doubt that was, y’know, creatures like me. Just think it was ye olde garden variety—_hah_—plants.”

“Creatures?”

“I’m not human, Brian,” Pat says, straightforward and blunt. “I’m not an animal, vegetable, or mineral.”

“Then what are you?” Brian asks, then winces. Pat’s not a _what_. Damn, putting his goddang foot in his goddang mouth again. “What are mandragora, then?”

Pat frowns and rubs at his forehead, like he could scrub the answer straight out of his brain. “Well,” he starts slowly, like he’s mulling over each word before he speaks it. “Uh, mandragora as we exist today have been around since the Middle Ages, but those—hm. The _lore _is that the first of us rose from the ground where hanged men spilled their seed.”

Brian sputters, an unexpected laugh gurgling out of his throat. “_Gross_!””

“That’s what—” Pats, smiling as he shakes his head. “I didn’t come up with that. Did you want me to say _jizz_?”

“_No_.”

Pat clears his throat. “That was the- the situation for the first of them, _allegedly_—but it’s hard to prove whether that was actually what happened, or if it’s all apocryphal. The texts we have are pretty poetic and vague.”

“Lotta vague shit,” Brian says before he can stop himself. 

“It’s all pretty vague,” Pat says with a shrug. He takes a sip of his tea, the color popping back to his cheeks with each passing moment. 

Brian has been breathing sighs of relief for two solid minutes. He’s not—he’s glad he didn’t take Pat to the doctor, that Pat hadn’t passed out and cracked his head open or something, because like—

“Do you even have blood, or is it chlorophyll?” 

“What kind of whack ass—”

“Sorry, sorry,” Brian says meekly, scruffling his hair. “I think I still might be in shock.” 

“It’s fine,” Pat says, clipped, even though it is obviously not fine. He clears his throat again. “But after that, we were grown by or born from witches. It’s, I mean, it’s just like a regular family—my mom’s a mandragora but my dad and stepdad are witches. There’s a lot of magical shit you can do with mandragora,” Pat adds. “Both real and fake.”

Brian frowns. The twist of Pat’s voice made it sound like mandragora didn’t necessarily _want _to be used for magical shit. “Such as?” he asks, 

“There was this _medical practice_,” Pat says, the air quotes heavily implied by his tone, “back in the Middle Ages. People would take ingredients that looked like different body parts and make them into medicines that would cure ailments in those body parts. Because God made them look like that as divine clues or something. So if a flower looked like an eyeball, you could crush it into a paste and it would cure your blindness or whatever.”

Brian nods sagely. “I’ve taken some science classes in my day, and I can verify: that’s _definitely_ a science.”

Pat claps Brian on the shoulder cordially. “I’m glad to have a- a real-life science boy here,” he says, then adds, “Mandragora, or more specifically, mandrake roots, look like tiny old men. So people thought mandrakes could be used for holistic, whole-body treatments.”

“Is that—I mean, were they right?” Brian asks. “It does sound like you are in fact magic, if not a tiny old man.”

Pat scoffs, “Brian, I am- I’m the tiniest, oldest man.” He points to his face, presumably to the crow’s feet that Pat’s been anxiously rubbing each morning at his desk, which Brian can barely see even under the fluorescent lights. “We’re not a miracle cure, but mandragora _can _do a bit of magic. Some healing. Not a whole lot without a witch, and honestly I’m personally kind of shit at it.

“But,” Pat cuts in, when Brian opens his mouth to stop the self-deprecating train before it rolls into the station, “when word got out we could do cool stuff, cure people’s gout or whatever, people began hunting us down. So we went into hiding.”

“Gee-zus, no kidding,” Brian says, frowning. He twists the cap of his drink. “Not that I don’t believe you, because you drank my blood earlier and that’s-uh, _fucking wild_, but. Mandrakes are plants, right? Like I could Wikipedia them and boom, hello, there’s a plant?”

Pat laughs. “Yeah, mandrakes are nightshades, which is dope as hell. I don’t think I could poison anyone even if I wanted to, though. Sort of like potatoes or tomatoes. I mean, I can make someone hallucinate but not by pointing my finger or something. I’d have to use some of my extract—”

“Gross.”

Pat rolls his eyes. “But like, yeah you could go to a specialty plant store and buy mandrake roots. And could plant them, and bathe them in the moonlight with your crystals, and talk to them about the importance of the earth, but it would do jack shit.” He pushes some hair behind his ear, scratches at his scruff. “They’re sort of like, uh, a different species? It’s hard to explain. But mandragora were originally just plants before a dead guy jizzed and gave us magic powers. The other plants would be like buying weed only to find out it’s oregano and you’re out fifty bucks.”

Brian blinks. He’s been having an out of body experience for a freakin’ hour, but that was the last straw that turned him into the Winnie the Pooh astral projection GIF. “I’m not sure that I’m following,” he says slowly, “but I’m going to say _okay _for now.”

Pat grins, the first big smile Brian’s seen from him in what’s felt like days. The motion pulls off the edge of a band-aid, the end flapping in the air like a weird tentacle. “Honestly, that’s what I do, and it’s gotten me pretty far in life,” Pat says. “All things considered.”

Brian nods, as though that answered fucking anything. “And, uh, the _blood_?”

Pat shifts on the couch, but freezes when there’s a loud noise from outside the streaming room and then the walls rattle. Someone slammed the door again. Samit, it sounds like, from the voice talking loudly on his phone as he walks past. They’re both still and quiet as fucking church mice until Samit enters the stairwell and the door shuts behind him. Pat lets out a long, shaky exhale. “Can we—if we’re gonna go through my superhero Origin Story,” he says, “do you want to come back to my apartment? I’d rather not do this whole convo in public.”

Oh right. It’s not like they’re having a cool, chill, normal conversation. People don’t get burned at the stake anymore, but well—after 2016, it seems like a lot of archaic things have been happening again. Brian doesn’t want to take any chances. “Yeah, of- of course, Pat,” Brian says. “Let’s finish packing up.”

“Thanks,” Pat says, the relief rolling off him in perceivable waves, which makes Brian feel worse about being a ding dong and freaking out earlier. “I’ll grab that big trash can from the kitchen so we can throw this mess away.”

Brian hums his approval and wipes some dust off his thighs. “I’ll shut down the computer and postpone all the updates that it wants us to make tonight.”

“Perfect,” Pat says. He starts peeling all of the remaining band-aids off his face, wincing when they catch what must be tiny beard hairs or maybe even eyebrow hairs (_oopsie doodle)_. Brian sets to working his own off, though he’d lucked out with more innocuous placements. Only the upper lip one gives him trouble—it smarts something terrible when he yanks it off, _just like ripping the band-aid_, and leaves his lip a little sore. 

Pat places his hands on his knees and, with a groan, pushes himself to his feet. He doesn’t appear to have any plant bits that Brian can see, no dirt spilling from Pat’s pockets, no green tinge to his skin. But Brian shakes his head, frowns at himself. Of course there’s nothing. He’s known Pat for like six months, and sure, Brian’s not the _most _observant person in the world, but he’d definitely notice if Pat had big ol’ roots instead of feet. Pat’s just a normal dude in normal boots. A hot dude in hot-as-shit boots, but not, y’know. The plant from _Little Shop_.

Pat’s phone starts vibrating on the table—or really, vibrating off the table, the force of the vibrations moving the phone like a Nintendo Labo toy. Brian doesn’t see the name that pops up on the call, but Pat frowns, a full colon-bracket face, and picks up the phone. “He never calls—lemme grab this real quick,” Pat says, already walking toward the door. “B-R-B.”

“T-T-Y-L,” Brian hollers as Pat shuts the door behind himself. Brian hears a soft, very confused _hello?_, before he actively avoids eavesdropping on Pat’s conversation. Instead, he turns to shut down the computer, logging out of Twitch, and very much ignoring the end of the chat and what they were saying about the stream.

Their chat is pretty good, for an internet chat. No assholes, or at the very least, no assholes that Brian ever sees. Sometimes they get a little rowdy, but well—Brian gets a little rowdy too. But it’s been surreal getting _fanart _of himself and the weird shit he says online. Even more surreal when he sees stuff like, _I wonder if they broke up?_

Brian’s never been more thankful for a computer to shut down in his life. Sure, he’s run across some fanart that, if Brian squints and tilts his head like one of those magic eye paintings, he could see that it’s definitely fanart of a certain, um, type. A type which he’s sure also includes drawings of his junk. But he resolutely searches the tag for Gill and Gilbert and absolutely doesn’t search _his_ name or scroll through his mentions. It’s very flattering that people would want to draw or write about his junk at all, but Brian doesn’t want to see it. Partially because he doesn’t want to see junk that doesn’t match his actual setup, but mostly because damn, then he’d think about Pat’s naked body even more than he already does, which is _way too much_. But he’s definitely included some Gilling in the Name Of fanart that’s a little more _shippy_. Clean, wholesome shit. And if Pat’s noticed, he hasn’t said anything.

Brian’s not sure if he wants Pat to say something. _Ay, there’s the rub!_

Pat’s out of the room for longer than Brian expects, but just when Brian’s about to pop his head out the door and see if Pat had forgotten his key, Brian hears Pat’s key in the lock. But when Pat walks into the room, his face is pulled down and ashen, the phone gripped tight in his other hand. He looks nasty again, like he had before, before—oh right, drinking Brian’s blood.

“What _happened_?” Brian asks, standing up, ready to punch whoever threatened Pat or made him eat a strawberry, or whatever happened outside the sanctity of the streaming room.

Pat grimaces and sweeps some of his hair out of his eyes. “I. We’ve got a problem,” he says, falling down onto the couch with the wearied exhaustion of a coal miner. He sinks into the couch like he’s hoping it’ll swallow him whole.

“My stepdad’s coming to visit.”


	2. Part 1 - 2/2

Brian blinks into the suddenly too-quiet streaming room, only the whir of the laptop shutting down, and the squeak of the couch as Brian shifts his weight interrupting the uncomfortable silence. Pat has his eyes wide like a spooked horse, terrified, but Brian’s not picking up on probably like two-thirds of what Pat is putting down. “Oh….kay?” he says, lilting up the end of the word like a question, because, _Okay?_ “What’s the problem?”

Pat slides his phone into his back pocket with trembling fingers that Brian helpfully does not point out. “It’s not, uh, _great_ that he’s choosing now to visit, especially since he implied—”

There’s a crash from out in the hallway, either custodial or some other poor soul working at eight pm on a Wednesday, but it spooks Pat like the horse he was halfway to looking like earlier. “You know what, no. We gotta do this somewhere else, sorry, I don’t—you don’t know—”

Brian places his hand over Pat’s elbow. The touch steadies him, it seems, even as it wholly unseats Brian. His skin is a little warmer than it had been earlier, which is good. Everything’s good as long as Pat is warm—unless he’s one of those plants that doesn’t like too much sunlight, which makes sense given his whole. Thing. “Your place still good?” Brian asks.

“Y-yeah,” Pat says, shifting out of Brian’s grip, hopefully not noticing Brian’s frown at the loss of his touch. “If we hurry, we can make the next train.”

They don’t make the next train.

They do catch the one after, though, only waiting on the platform for six or so minutes before it screeches down the totally safe, definitely under-maintained track. The trains are always some level of crowded before midnight, especially from the financial district where be-suited people have worked long hours _not _playing video games for money. But they both snag seats next to each other, and there’s only one person drumming at the other end of the car for tips. To Brian, that feels like relatively empty. He guesses he’s a real New Yorker now. 

The silence stretches on between them, as it had for the brisk walk to the station, then the slower, resolute walk when they realized there was no way in hell they’d make it anyway so they might as well take their time. Brian doesn’t know what to do when you find out someone’s inhuman. Hm. _Not human_, maybe. _Inhuman _sounds like a slur, which, maybe he can ask Pat about. He might appreciate that. Personally, Brian would prefer to enlighten people pretty close to Moment Zero about what they shouldn’t say when—oh, which reminds him—

“Y’know, I think that’s the best my coming out has ever been first received,” Brian says thoughtfully, inclining his head toward Pat, who’s fiddling with the Twitter app on his phone like he’s never used it before. “One for the record books.”

Pat puts his phone face-down in his lap and smiles bashfully. “Oh geez, sorry for stealing your Big Moment.”

“Honestly, please don’t make it a big moment at all,” Brian says, rolling his eyes. “Do you know how freakin’ _refreshing _it is to not have to explain what gender is while I’m just trying to, like, get my student loan paperwork changed, or save my coworker’s life?”

“I can’t relate,” Pat says, “but also, dude I can _totally _relate.” Then he frowns. “Oh, sorry for uh—if you don’t like _dude_ or, or other gendered language, I can. Not. Or if you want me to use different pronouns or something. Just let me know how- how um. I can support you.”

Brian grins, because Pat may be a dumbass, but he’s _Brian’s _dumbass. If only in a friendly way. Brian sticks out his arm, hand extended, and raises his eyebrows. “Hi, I’m Brian. I use he/him pronouns. Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

Pat laughs. “Hi Brian, I’m Patrick, I use he/him pronouns too.” He pauses for a couple of beats, then adds, “I’m also a plant.”

Brian needs to take a quick breather at the fourth landing of Pat’s fifth-floor walk-up, which Pat looks very guilty about. As if it’s Pat’s fault that Brian’s out of shape now that he’s not dancing every day. “Sorry,” Pat says, “the stairs suck total ass, and it’s _really_ far from the station, but I needed a studio on. Uh. Short notice. And this is what I found.”

“No, it’s fine!” Brian says breathlessly, in a tone that conveys that it’s not _really _fine, but what is there to be done about it. He gulps two big lungfuls of air that burn a bit on the way down and then forges on. Pat’s on the top floor of the building, just three doors opening out onto the landing. The other two have welcome mats, and one even has a bizarrely patriotic Memorial Day wreath, but Pat doesn’t have a wreath or a welcome mat. He does have a collection of several bells dangling from his doorknob like a set of indoor wind chimes, tied together with what looks like hemp rope and fabric.

Brian’s never been inside Pat’s apartment, so other than what he’s seen in the background of Pat’s streams (read: not a lot), he has nothing to go off. Other than large sweaters and worn-in flannels, Brian has no idea about Pat’s aesthetic taste. So Brian’s at least expecting cozy and comfortable, but Pat pushes open the door and they step inside and—

Huh.

What Brian can see looks _bare_. Maybe minimalist, if he were being generous enough to say that the lack of anything _exciting_ or _lived-in_ was intentional. But it looks like one of the model houses Brian’s mom used to drag him to on the weekends. There’s a sealed-up fireplace taking up way too much wall space, but Pat’s put his couch in front of it to block the view and chipping white paint. In the tiny studio kitchen, there are some dried herbs hanging over the sink, some kitchen towels that look handmade and well-loved. There are some stark attempts at decor throughout—a bowl for Pat’s keys on the table that inexplicably also has three M&Ms in it, two giant Pinterest-worthy crystals on the shelf above the fireplace, a philodendron on the windowsill making a grand viney escape toward the floor—but that’s. Unfortunately and depressingly. It. Except for the things that belong to Charles—his scratching post and his food bowls and his bed, from which he acknowledges their presence by yelling in their general direction for food—Pat’s apartment is downright _depressing_.

But that’s rude. _Brian’s_ apartment looks like a college dorm room, all mismatched furniture and weird stolen road signs and four forks and four knives but only two spoons. Zuko’s bed is one of Brian’s old shirts that lives next to the couch for expressly that purpose. So who’s he to judge if Pat’s apartment doesn’t look like _Architectural Digest_. At least Pat lives alone and even has a quasi-bedroom. It’s definitely still a studio in size and also lack of closet space if Pat’s large wardrobe is indicative of anything, but there’s a wall spanning across two-thirds of the length of a nook that holds Pat’s bed and one nightstand and a shitty vertical window and all of Pat’s streaming equipment.

“Do you, uh, want anything to drink?” Pat asks, hovering awkwardly in the kitchen-slash-living room-slash-dining room. “I think I’m got some beers, some questionably old 2% milk. Maybe a seltzer rolling around in the back?”

Brian laughs. He almost says, _not a lot of guests? _But tamps that down because, hah, rude again. He’s really gotta work on that comedic style, and by work on, he means _get rid of_. “I uh, not sure a beer would be good right now,” he says. “My nerves are still a little shot for some reason?”

“A near-death experience will have that effect on you,” Pat says, as though it wasn’t _his _near-death experience since he looks cool as a fucking cucumber. But he looks thoughtful, studying Brian who hasn’t taken his shoes off yet, what a weirdo. Brian toes off his shoes and kicks them gently and neatly toward the space next to Pat’s.

“What would you- you say your top two emotions are right now?” Pat asks, his head cocked in that still-thoughtful expression.

“Is anxiety an emotion.”

Pat smiles. “My therapist would disagree, but I’ll allow it.”

“Okay,” Brian says, chewing on his bottom lip. “Then anxiety and curiosity?”

“I’m not sure that one’s an emotion either,” Pat says, “but it does get the point across. Tea?”

“Sorry?”

“Oh, would you like tea?”

“Ah, yeah that sounds good, actually,” Brian says. Maybe a nice sleepytime tea to knock him the fuck out and kick him back into his awake self, since this may be a dream. Brian’s pretty sure it’s not, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure. “What kind ya got, Pat?”

Pat chuckles, already busying himself in a cupboard, presumably looking for a mug. “Oh, you’re getting a Pat Original, baybee.”

Pat puts the kettle on one of his two burners, then sets a teapot on the counter. It’s glass and delicate, rounded like an orb with just the tiniest little spout. Pat pops in a strainer and then moves to the sink to stare at his hanging herbs. It’s mesmerizing, how lost in concentration he is, a type of focus he normally only gets when playing Dark Souls. But in many ways, Pat in his own home, moving around his space—his peculiarities make more sense. He’s careful. Considering. Calculating. He plucks a few leaves of what Brian _thinks _is mint, then some thyme, then opens a steel canister next to the sink and scoops out a spoonful of some tan flowers and something else Brian can’t place. Pat mixes the items together dry in a small white bowl, then transfers them with his hands to the little basket. When the kettle starts to whistle, Pat pours the boiling water into his teapot and lets everything steep for a bit. 

He’s not _ignoring _Brian, per se, just caught up in his own routine, humming gently to himself as Charlie winds around Pat’s legs. It’s fascinating to watch. He’s just making tea, washing some dishes, scooping more dry food into Charlie’s bowl, but god it could be a spell for how precise and methodical Pat is about the ingredients, about everything being in its proper place. Brian hovers by the door, certain there was an implied _make yourself at home_ that comes with offering tea to your guests, but Brian feels awkward just marching in like he owns the place. Especially when it would leave such an obvious impression of where he’s been in Pat’s otherwise sterile home.

The tea finishes steeping, and Pat removes the strainer and places it in the sink to cool before washing, he narrates out loud. “Burned my fingers on the metal one too many times,” he says. He places the lid back on the teapot and pours tea into two mugs, one plain white with a chip in the handle, and the other a souvenir mug from Coney Island with a dick joke about the hot dogs. Brian can’t decide whether he _does _or _doesn’t _want that one. 

Pat adds a sprinkle of more herbs to both cups, then grabs a tiny spoon and stirs the plain white mug three times clockwise, three times counterclockwise. Then he hands Brian that mug. 

Brian takes a sip, the aroma hitting him before the taste. Orange peels, turns out, were the strange unknown ingredient, dried orange peels that bloomed in the hot water and added a lovely, citrusy twist to the—chamomile, the flowers—and the mint. It’s certainly not a pre-made blend, and the mint is almost _too much_ for how cool it is on the back of Brian’s tongue, contrasting with the bright oranges. It’s a lot to take in. But after two sips, Brian feels calm. 

Instantly calm. 

Not _uber _calm, he’s not like. Numb. But he gets a warm feeling down his back like someone’s petting his hair and telling him everything will be alright.

Brian narrows his eyes. “What is this?” he asks suspiciously, glaring at Pat.

“It’s just tea, Brian,” Pat says, taking a noisy sip as he sits down.

“Pat.”

“Okay, maybe not _just_ tea,” Pat concedes, and he’s got some tea on his upper lip, cute. “But it’s not like a _potion_ or anything. I just gave the chamomile a bit of a boost and added extra mint to help cool the energy in your body.”

Brian gasps, upsetting some of his tea in the process. A couple drops spill out onto his thigh. “Tea magic!!” he exclaims, feeling his grin stretch to the sides of his face. “Cool as heck, Pat.”

Pat smiles back, and it’s warm and mellow, like the tea he’s drinking. “I can do a bit of magic on my own, mostly Plant Stuff, but for pretty much anything else I’d need a witch to help guide it.”

“Talk more about that,” Brian says, taking another sip of his tea. He curls an orange peel around on his tongue. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned witches.”

Pat hums. “More vague lore?”

“My favorite kind.”

“Now we both know that’s not true,” Pat says, but he continues. “So at the same time people were chopping up mandragora to make them lucky in love or whatever, they were also burning witches at the stake. Sort of a nasty time for magical folk in general. Especially for witches, who were feared, and for mandragora, who were coveted.”

“Yikes.” Brian grabs his mug in both palms, leeching as much of the warmth as he can into his hands.

“But, realizing each other’s dire situation, witches and mandragora made a pact to help each other,” Pat says. He crosses one leg over the other. “Witches spread some truly _nasty _rumors about what happens to people if they plucked a mandrake root from the ground. Made up something really wild about using dogs to do it. I can’t believe that worked, but I guess people in 1500 didn’t know about, like, germs, so it makes sense. They also gave us some of their life force to sustain us and keep us hidden. And in return, mandragora boosted witches’ magic and provided extracts—”

“Still gross.”

“—to use in their potions. And that pact has lasted for hundreds of years.”

Brian nods, as though all of that makes sense, as though it’s the logical next step to Pat telling Brian that he’s a plant. Though Brian supposes it sort of _is _the logical next step. As logical as something can be when magical plants and witches are involved. Brian’s—well, he’s not sure that _suspended his disbelief _is correct, since he does believe Pat, but he’s certainly had to throw out everything he thought he knew about the world in his first twenty-three years of life. His logic-o-meter is pretty busted for the time being.

He glances at Charles, who’s staring out the window, presumably at nothing, and wonders if this is a _Sabrina the Teenage Witch_ situation. Like Pat’s witch is trapped as a cat for witch crimes or something. But that seems unlikely, given that Charles bonks his forehead against the window in an attempt to get the maybe-bird outside. It doesn’t seem like there’s any intelligent life in there. But if Charles isn’t Pat’s witch—

“So mandragora need witches to literally survive?”

Pat grimaces, the frown lines reappearing on his forehead. He swigs the rest of his tea, still way too hot to do so like it’s a shot. “That’s actually what my stepdad was calling about,” he says. “When I canceled plans with my folks, he tuned in to Gill and Gilbert to see how I was doing. And he could tell immediately I didn’t have, uh- a standard cold.” Pat sighs and rubs his temples so hard that it leaves a faint red mark on his skin. Brian starts to reach out for his hand, to yank it away like he would for Laura or Jonah, but he hesitates in mid-air. Not sure if Pat would want that. But Pat moves his hand away anyway, even without contact, and places it close to Brian’s on his knee. Brian sucks in a breath as quietly as _fucking humanly possible_, but he grabs Pat’s hand and holds it gently in his lap.

“We get like this when we haven’t been sustained by a witch’s magic in a while,” Pat adds, his thumb twitching under Brian’s fingers. “Like if you don’t give your succulent what it needs for long enough and it starts to die from the outside in.”

Brian thinks about the half-dead echeveria on his desk at work that he’s fairly certain he hasn’t watered in three? Months? He resolves to water it tomorrow morning. Or maybe keep not watering it? Maybe he needs to water it every four months. Maybe Pat would know.

“We really got into it over the phone,” Pat continues. “My stepdad wants me to move back to Maine and pledge myself to a witch there. But I don’t _want_ to go back to Maine. I mean, I fucking hate New York, but I don’t _actually_ hate New York.”

“People ask me that about Baltimore all the time,” Brian says, struggling to find something to relate, to focus on so he doesn’t start stroking over Pat’s knuckles like a weird-ass creep-ass friend. “I miss it a whole bunch, and New York is too- too noisy! And I hate the summer trash-and-piss smell, but also, Pat? I _love _all that shit.”

“Contrary to popular belief I don’t _love _the piss smell,” Pat says, raising his eyebrows, “but otherwise, exactly. I also was in panic mode after, y’know, _coming out of the greenhouse_, so to speak, so my mouth replied without my- my brain’s input that I’d recently found a witch and we would be making it official soon. Just to buy me more time to find a new witch. But then he got _way _too fucking excited like he always does. Wants to meet my new witch and introduce himself, though—” and then Pat adopts a weird, stilted voice, “your witch probably already knows who _I _am!”

Brian shuffles until he’s sideways on the couch, cross-legged with his mug in the hollow of his lap. “Can I—jeez, Pat, can I like? Help you find a witch?”

Charlie must sense Pat’s anxiety because Pat’s mouth twitches down into his eight hundredth frown of the evening, and Charlie is there in half a second, curled up in Pat’s lap. Probably much warmer than Brian’s mug of tea. Brian doesn’t know if a familiar can have a familiar, but maybe that’s just a Charles thing. Being exactly what Pat needs at exactly the right time. Or exactly the wrong time, because well—he is still a cat, and probably not a witch trapped in a cat’s body. Which seems like it might be better for Pat’s overall sitch. 

“That’s the problem, uh, actually,” Pat says, moving one broad hand down the length of Charlie’s curled back, all the way down to the tip of his tail. “I was hoping I could ask Simone for a favor when he’s in town since she’s between familiars and loves a good excuse to dress up in period gowns for a night.”

Brian’s halfway to asking, _Wait, Simone’s a witch? _but honestly, he answers that one before it’s even out of his mouth. Of course she’s a witch. He’s never seen anyone come close to her number of capes. Plus she drinks a _lot _of bone broth. But Brian realizes that Pat’s still talking, so oh. Not Simone, then, for this one.

“—of course, and then he said, uh.” Pat’s face goes tomato red. Embarrassed to his core. “This wasn’t my stepdad’s first time watching our- our show, so when I said I’d found a new witch, he just uh. Automatically assumed it was. You.”

Brian coughs. He hadn’t been taking a drink, but he chokes on air like he’d somehow swallowed something down the wrong pipe. “Me?” he squeaks, incredulous. “Why would he—did you?”

“I guess we, uh. I look like your familiar,” Pat says, then rushes to add, “To him.”

“_How_?”

“The challenges and segments and stuff? I don’t know, Brian,” Pat says, running a hand through his hair; Charles grumbles at the upset and shifts around on Pat’s lap. “You tell me to do stuff, and I do it. That was enough for him.”

Brian chews on that for a moment, then swallows it like a stale piece of gum. “Patrick, when’s he coming?” Brian asks, instead of the thousand other—perhaps more important—questions rattling around in his noggin. 

“Friday night,” Pat says, guilty, as though this is all his fault. And it’s not Pat’s fault, but it’s also. A bit Pat’s fault. “My stepdad and his familiar are coming down Friday and leaving Saturday morning.”

Brian feels the blood drain from his face as his head swims. “Christ,” he says, and regrets it immediately when Pat flinches, but like. _Christ_. “Pat, that’s- that’s in two days.”

“I know,” Pat says, getting his other hand in his hair now. “I need—well, it would really help me out—no fuck that,” Pat grouses, turning on himself, “it is something I _need_. I need you to convince my stepdad that you’re my witch, and do a good enough job that he leaves me the fuck alone.”

Brian sighs and squeezes his mug between his thighs so he can rub both of his hands down his face. “I’m not a witch,” Brian groans, which he realizes isn’t a _no_. “I can’t do magic.”

“All humans are a little magic,” Pat says simply, pleadingly, as if he isn’t destroying centuries of academic research with one sentence. “The magic transfer works both ways; I think I can boost your latent abilities for long enough to get him off my case.”

Brian stands, places his mug on the table so he can pace properly and with gusto. “My _latent_—So what, I do some card tricks at dinner and hopefully your stepdad buys it?” Brian asks. There’s a hysterical bend to his voice that he doesn’t love, but he can’t stop. Every inch of him is wiggling nervously, including his vocal cords. “And then he says _yep, everything’s good, Pat’s fine, even though he still looks a little pale around the edges_? What happens after that? You said it yourself, Pat, you need a witch.”

“I’ll find someone,” Pat insists. “I just. Haven’t had a chance with work, and I hadn’t realized how low I was until it was too late. Brian, I—” Pat grabs his hand again, pulling Brian slightly out of his pacing path and toward Pat’s body; Charles hops off the couch and wanders into the kitchen. “Brian, _please_. I don’t want to go back to Maine. I want to stay in New York and live my own life with my own friends and my own—” 

Pat takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, looks so forlorn that it softens Brian’s edges back into feathers. “I- I need someone to pretend to be my witch on Friday night to buy me some time, and I also need it to be you. Please? I’ll do literally anything for you. I’ll edit your videos for a— for a fucking _month_, whatever it takes.”

Brian could walk out now, he knows. Pat wouldn’t even hold a grudge for longer than a few days because he’s annoyingly kind like that. Brian could pretend that magic doesn’t exist, that Pat’s a real boy, that their friendship is unchanged and everything’s normal and Brian did the right thing. He could act his little heart out.

But of course he’s going to help Pat. He’s always going to help Pat—whether it’s finishing up one of Pat’s videos when he’s slammed at work, or- or apparently postponing his freakout about the world of magic that’s coexisted alongside him.

“Pat, I—you don’t need to do anything for me,” Brian says, finally giving in to his desire, rubbing over Pat’s knuckles. He sits on the couch again, their knees bumping when he adjusts his position. “You’re my friend. Just tell me what to do.”

A couple of tears slide down Pat’s cheeks, and while Pat isn’t a toxically masculine guy, Brian’s still never seen him cry before tonight. And now it's happened _twice_. Before Brian can really think about what he’s doing, he sweeps away the largest one with the pad of his thumb like he'd wanted to earlier. Pat inhales sharply at the contact, and Brian yanks his hand away. Both of his hands away, out of Pat’s grip and a solid five feet away. _Jesus _that was too much, Brian, get it the fuck together.

“Brian, thank you,” Pat says, and Brian notices that it’s a little choked out, but he doesn’t comment on it. “Seriously, I know this is a big ask and I also know you that I’ve given you like at least two dozen things to process, so. You know. Feel- feel free to run screaming whenever.” It’s self-deprecating, and Pat huffs a laugh as he takes a shaky sip of his tea, but it’s definitely not a joke. Even if Pat wants it to be. Desperately.

“I’m not going to run screaming, Pat,” Brian says, though yeah. He thought about it. “If the vampire shit didn’t scare me, lying to your stepdad won’t either.”

“Not a v-vampire,” Pat mumbles. “Went to high school with one, though.”

“Seriously?”

“No.”

Brian sighs. “Okay, just kidding I’m not going to help, and I’m calling the cops.” He pulls out his phone. “Beep boop, here I go.”

“Fucking class traitor,” Pat says, but he’s smiling his bright smile, even if it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Just when I was gonna give you witch lessons, too.”

Brian pretends to hang up his phone then slides it back into his lap. “Okay not gonna lie, I’ve been low-key freaking out for like, uh, _three hours_. But _witch lessons_ is pulling me out of it a bit. Very Harry Potter, before J.K. Rowling came out as a TERF.”

“You hate to see it,” Pat says sadly. “But yeah this won’t be like Hogwarts, it’ll be us, in my kitchen, cramming centuries of witch lore in 48 hours. Which reminds me, ah.” Pat brushes some lint off his pants, looks away from Brian’s eyes. “Do you have PTO to take the day off? We’re already cutting it way too fucking close re: time, there’s no way we can metaphorically afford to go to work tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I can call in sick,” Brian says. The mental math tells him it’ll make his Thanksgiving plans one day shorter but, well, maybe it’s a Friendsgiving year instead. Moose will understand. 

“Okay, perfect, I’ll take off too and. And you can come over tomorrow morning for, uh, _witch lessons_.”

Brian rubs his hands together and lets a manic grin stretch across his face. “Ooh, at the witching hour?”

“Brian,” Pat scoffs, “that’s like 3 AM.”

“So . . . _not_ the witching hour?”

Pat chuckles and gathers up Brian’s mug, his mug, and shuffles off to the kitchen with them. “No, please don’t get here before ten, I’ll die.”

“I saved you once, I can save you again,” Brian says with a sniff. And maybe the joke is too soon, like, _way _too soon, but Pat snorts. “Do I need to bring anything? A cauldron? A broomstick?”

“Don’t patronize me, Brian.”

“Right, right, sorry,” Brian says, cowed.

“I mean where would I keep a cauldron in my apartment, this is New York.”

“My landlord won’t even technically let me hang pictures on the wall,” Brian says, pushing some of his hair out of his face. “I can’t imagine he’d be chill with a cauldron.”

“More trouble than they’re worth, honestly,” Pat says.

“Landlords or cauldrons?”

Pat laughs. “Both, but in this instance, I was specifically talking about cauldrons. So pretentious. Just use a fucking bowl.”

“I’m learning so much already,” Brian says. He steeples his fingers and leans closer, the picture of an attentive student. He didn’t spend 17 years being a teacher’s pet and kiss-ass to let those skills go to waste.

“Witch Lessons zero-point-one, baybee.”

“I can’t wait for lesson zero-point-two,” Brian says, before unfolding himself from his position. “But honestly? I think I’m right on the edge of that earlier freakout I pushed deep, deep down to process later.”

Pat frowns, opens his mouth, but Brian shakes his head and cuts him off. “No, no it’s fine, I’m _fine _with you, with this,” Brian assures him, his voice going high and quick and stumbling. “I just. Pat, I just learned that magic is real, and also that- that, uh, you have a stepdad, what the fuck? You are the privatest motherfucker for someone who st-streams three days a week. 

I just have a lot to process and think through,” Brian adds, “and I’m a little stressed, and also I know that the blood loss wasn’t enough to make me woozy, but I _am _going to use it as an excuse to swing through the McDonald’s on my way home for a metric fuckton of nuggs.”

“That sounds p—well, it doesn’t sound _perfect_,” Pat amends. “I’m still stressed the fuck out and also I want nuggets, but my old man tummy would not like that. But it sounds. Like a plan?”

“It’s a plan, Pat Gill,” Brian says. He smirks, adds, “Circle up tomorrow, ten am?”

“Roger that,” Pat says.

Brian sighs. “Pat, I’ve told you over a dozen times. My name’s Brian.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves. The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved._— Song of Songs 7:12–13, King James Version


	3. Part 2 - 1/2

Brian shows up at Pat’s apartment building promptly at 10:05 a.m. with two coffees in a cardboard drink container, which he nearly topples over trying to press the buzzer at the front entrance with his elbow. The walk up the stairs is less treacherous than it was last night, or at least that’s what Brian tells himself when he makes it to the final landing without stopping—still, he does need to take several deep, hunched-over breaths before knocking on Pat’s door. How does anyone do it, what the fuck?

Brian raps three quick times, rattling the bells around the knob. Pat answers within five seconds—which, Brian guesses, is approximately the time it would take Pat’s stupidly long legs to stride over from the kitchen. He’s tense, peering out a tiny crack, before sighing audibly and opening the door the rest of the way. 

“Was afraid he might’ve come early,” Pat says, both an explanation and, somehow, a greeting. He’s dressed down but not sloppy: comfy, loose jeans; that _ DOOM _ cheat code tee, bare feet. A casual Thursday playing hooky from work to teach some magic lessons. Brian’s glad he instinctively got the memo, even if he wouldn’t be caught _ dead _ in a gamer tee. A heather gray Hopkins shirt was caszh enough. 

“That’s what she said,” Brian says tonelessly, almost second nature, as he bustles into the apartment. Pat snorts, which is way more than the joke deserved. He must still be half asleep, which is good because Brian’s brought—

“Sorry it’s not magic coffee,” Brian says, unloading the drinks from their container onto the kitchen counter, “but I can’t do magic yet.”

Pat’s shoulders loosen from around his ears and he smiles that big, warm smile that makes Brian’s insides do a stupid and inappropriate twist. Pat doesn’t look _great_, but he sure looks _better_. You’d never know he drank Brian’s blood like fifteen hours ago. “All coffee is magic, Brian,” Pat says. He takes his cup, cradles it under his face like a character in a Ghibli movie.

Brian squints. “Do you mean that in a metaphorical way, or in a magical way?”

“Yes.”

“Oh fuck you.”

Pat takes a quick sip of his coffee and the placebo effect of _nice warm drink _perks him up like a plant turning to face the sun. Or, hmm. Like a plant facing the. Caffeine. The metaphor really breaks down when one person’s not human, huh. Brian frowns and takes a sip of his latte. He’s really gotta figure out of those jokes are in poor taste.

“I want to ask you a question about your, uh, whole sitch,” Brian starts, “but I don’t know if it’s offensive or not.”

Pat hums. “I doubt you could say something that would upset me, so fire away.” He adds, “I mean, s’probably in our best interest for you to know as much as possible anyway, since you’re, uh. You know. My witch.”

Brian’s stomach loops in his chest. There’s a striking difference between _a witch _and _my witch _that Brian had glossed over last night. But here, in the bright late morning, a latte burning his fingertips through the take-out cup? It twists up his stomach in a way that’s good, but also a way that he’ll need to process later.

He’s gonna have a lot to process later, but really. What else is new.

“I guess you’re right,” Brian concedes. He leans his elbows on the counter and sets down his coffee. “So, h’okay. I—coffee isn’t strictly _good _ for plants, right? But I know you eat stuff too. Your whole _brand _is doing. your. thang. while eating pizza. But also, the blood? What’s that all about?”

Pat slurps his coffee in the way that both fancy people and assholes do. “The blood wasn’t food, and I’m not—I’m, y’know, not actually a plant. Or- or totally a plant? I’m definitely a bit of a plant.” He frowns, cuts himself off with an audible snap. “I can’t photosynthesize and I have this meat sack I gotta lug around, so I eat regular boy food. The blood was sort-of like. Hm, sort of like taking some of your life force, which sounds bad now that I’m saying it out loud.”

“No worse than if it _had _been food,” Brian offers, which. Probably isn’t helpful. “Like in Castlevania, right? The Alura Une?”

Pat blinks. “Yeah, actually?” He seems surprised, keeps his coffee close to his face as he slides out a barstool with his ankle around the leg. When he sits, Charles yawns and wanders over as if there would _possibly _be room on Pat’s lap for his giant fuzzy body. “I can’t believe that was your pull,” Pat says. “Most people go for Harry Potter.”

“I may have stayed up too late last night reading all the Wikis on mandrakes,” Brian says. He shrugs, circles his fingertip around the lid of his coffee cup. He’s oversimplifying _read everything I could in a panic until 3 a.m. even though most of it was unhelpful or weird 20th-century german morality tales_. That one fucked Brian up the worst, he thinks.

“Plus,” Brian adds, super casual, “I had a massive crush on Richter Belmont as a kid.”

“Who didn’t?” Pat offers, flip as anything. Brian adds it to the file folder in his brain titled _ PAT SEXUALITY??? _ but is proud of his lack-of-reaction in the meat space. “But yeah,” Pat continues, “we need life force to sustain us, but it doesn’t have to be blood. It can be spiritual energy or magic too. And then we can eat all the Lotzza Motzzas we want.

Brian glances at his finger, the papercut-thin slice still visible across the tip. He’d put a band-aid on it last night, but it was already set to jet re: not bleeding all over the place. Just a bit of energy, Pat had said. Not even enough to make a dent on Brian. “How often do you need that, then?” he asks, still staring at his own hand. “Should I top you off?”

Pat shakes his head. “Nah, I should be good for a bit now,” he says. “You’d be surprised how far one drop of blood goes.”

“A dollop’ll do ya,” Brian sing-songs. It’s quiet between them for a moment before he asks, “So you’ve been without a witch for a while, then?”

“About a year,” Pat says softly. He runs his thumb over the mouth spout of the coffee cup lid and looks off into the middle distance. It’s a look Brian saw a lot when he first started at Polygon.

_ Ah _.

Brian promptly ollies the _fuck _out of that conversation. 

“And now you’ve got my muggle ass,” Brian says quickly, elbowing Pat in the side. “Whatcha gonna teach me today, Professor McGonagall?”

Pat gestures back to the kitchen counter where there’s, ah, Brian notices it now—a shitload of herbs and glass vials and knives. It’s a very Pinterest witchy vibe. He didn’t know Pat had it in ‘im. 

“I mean, witches study for years—”  
  
“At Hogwarts,” Brian adds helpfully.   
  
“—so nothing too complicated, but uh. Maybe some herbal medicine, some minor spells. Kinda like cantrips, I guess, if you play D&D?”

“Pat look at me. Of course I play D&D.”

Pat laughs. “Yeah, but—okay, y’know what? That’s fair. These are things that any witch wouldn’t have to think about doing. Like _ oh, my water glass is empty, I’m gonna refill it on the sly while the waiter’s busy calming down a boomer in the corner _.”

Brian whistles lowly. “Damn, that could have saved me at like every family dinner I’ve had since I was thirteen,” Brian says. “I’m always the one nervously drinking Diet Coke until a server brings me my own pitcher. It’d be nice if only I was aware of that sitch instead of the entire restaurant.”

“But first, coffee,” Pat says, quoting every mug that was for sale at the shop down the street. “And then—something a little easier than curing your anxiety.”

“Hey.” 

\---

“This looks like we’re making a crunchy salad,” Brian says, inspecting the spread of ingredients in the kitchen. Some plants he knows, like thyme and basil, but others are totally foreign. Brian would have never guessed that Pat was into herbs, but to be fair he also never would have guessed that Pat was a plant, so. Oh for Two on that one. 

He plops a handful of the herbs onto a clean bit of counter space and then wipes his palms on his thighs as Pat carefully arranges some sprigs of mint near the sink. There’s barely enough space for two full-grown men in a tiny, shit-ass New York kitchen. But of course, Brian’s Hallmark Christmas Movie brain supplies, there’d be plenty of space if they cuddled together. Except they aren’t baking gingerbread for the church fundraiser, they’re making a _ witch’s brewwwww_.

“I mean you could eat any of this shit if you wanted,” Pat adds, “but it won’t do anything other than taste bad. A lot of what I do is herbal magic because it doesn’t require a lot of thought. Added bonus, it’s- it’s also easier to explain away if a stranger comes over to my house.” He rubs his fingers along a branch of cinnamon. Pat may not pay the same kind of attention to himself, but he treats his things, his friends, with _such care_. 

“I’m all set up to teach you some basic tinctures, but—well,” Pat amends, “they take like weeks to finish. It’ll sort of be like that cooking show thing where they make it ahead of time and surprise! Pull it out from the rack below.”

“One of my roommates in college used to make tinctures to ease her menstrual cramps,” Brian says like he knows any fucking thing about witchcraft. “I don’t know if she was a witch or really liked candles, but I know it’d take her all month to brew one up for her _ sacred time_ as she called it.”

“Honestly, could go either way,” Pat says with a snort. “Any time I hear someone talking about charging their crystals in the moonlight, I give them subtle yet significant looks trying to figure out if they’re a witch or if they read a lot of _ Bustle _articles. But yeah,” he adds, “obviously we don’t have that kind of time. However, I learned to make most of these as a lil guy, so you’d definitely know how to make them, too.”

“How should I play this?” Brian asks, cocking his head as he rolls a hazelnut around in his fingers. “Are these tinctures something that I would have learned then, too. _ Of _course _ I know how to do the mint and orange peel thing! _ Or should I cook up a charming story about how you taught me your secret family recipe? _ Patrick makes the _ best _ mint and orange peel thing, I simply _ must _ give you the recipe _?” 

“The concepts are basic,” Pat says, “but each witch or familiar or whomstever has their own recipe, typically passed down through a family. My mom has some cards from my grandma, from _her _grandma, which she’d translated from like Middle Welch or Gaelic or something. But also, once you get the hang of herbal properties, you can make most things on the fly. And they probably won’t kill you or main you even a little bit.” 

“Oh goody,” Brian says.

After Brian washes his hands, Pat gives him instructions for how many of each root, herb, flower, and spice they’ll need. Some of them, Brian chops with a large, sharp-as-hell knife. Others he’s told to shred apart with his fingers, taking care to feel where the veins of the leaves run through the plant. It is in fact as crunchy granola as Brian assumed it would be, but it’s soothing—Pat intoning in a low, soft voice how to tear apart the mint so that it releases its aroma before being steeped in any water. 

Meanwhile, Pat grabs a giant bottle of what he assures Brian is _ totally legal grain alcohol, definitely not moonshine _ and begins portioning it out into several mason jars. It reminds Brian of that time Laura got really into canning even though they live in New York and not on a homestead. She’d pickled a few dozen tomatoes and some ginger that Brian had really enjoyed, but then she’d accidentally ruined some carrots and that was the end of Laura’s Canning Adventure, Summer 2017. It’s not canning, certainly, but potion-making seems very similar. Pat uses a funnel and a wide-mouth glass jar, short and squat, to make sure he doesn’t spill anything. And by the time Brian’s done chopping and feeling and separating, Pat’s finished with his grand task.

“You can extract any of these items into water and they’ll do similar shit, but they don’t work as well,” Pat says, gesturing to the alcohol. “Not enough of the _stuff _leeches out. Just like if you were infusing vodka or gin or something, we’re trying to get as much of the _ magic flavor _out of the ingredients as possible to make the tinctures effective.”

Pat grabs a piece of mint, chews it, and frowns. “I always think that’s going to taste better than it actually does,” he says, then clears his throat. “So, what’re we cookin’ up today?”

“I can pick?” Brian asks. He wasn’t expecting to make any decisions. He’s only known magic exists for, uh, _ one day_, and now Pat wants him to choose a spell out of a spellbook, or something? This isn’t _ Halloweentown _. 

“It works better when you have a clear _something _you’re trying to fix or gain or remove,” Pat says, fiddling with more mint. “Especially when you’re learning. If you start with shit you care about, it’s easier to move to other stuff. Like, _ ah, I’m almost out of a mugwort infusion, I should hop to it _—and before you ask,” Pat adds, “a mugwort infusion is good for when you’re shitting your brain outs because you ate too much ice cream and youw tummy huwts.”

Brian stares down at the hunks of leaves, a pile of organized mess, and sighs. It’s the damn problem of having too many options and getting overwhelmed to the point of inactivity. Pat says, _ do any magic you want! _ and suddenly Brian has forgotten everything he’s ever wished for during games on the playground. The unfortunate first thing that comes to his mind is a _ love potion _, but that’s so fucking gross he’s mad at the intrusive thought before it fully flits through his brain. 

What he says instead is, “Maybe something for energy? Don’t wanna hit the ol’ mid-afternoon slump.”

“Perfect,” Pat says, brushing some things aside. “I mean, again, you won’t actually be drinking it today, but that’s a good one to start with.”

Pat gently moves Brian out of the way, muttering a soft _ ‘scuse _ under his breath as he gathers a hunk of ginger root from a fruit bowl and scoops several different herbs into his palm. He then directs Brian to a drawer next to the sink, where Brian finds, among other bits and bobs—and weirdly, a can opener and some old beer bottle caps—a tall glass vial of whole vanilla beans. 

“The vanilla’s for clearing the mind and boosting your RAM,” Pat says. He lets Brian choose two beans from the pile while he digs out a tall wide-mouth mason jar from his cabinet. Pat tries to shut the cabinet door quickly, but Brian catches a glimpse of the utter _chaos _of lids and Tupperware inside. Soon enough, though, Pat’s up with a matching jar and lid. “Most important rule of tinctures,” Pat adds, “don’t fucking poison yourself with mold.” 

“Noted,” Brian says, slipping the beans into the jar when Pat places it on the counter.

“Ginger’s good for exhaustion and relieving muscle cramps that unfortunately come with having a body. You’re gonna want four heaping teaspoons of grated ginger in this bad boy.” Pat reaches into his only other kitchen drawer and grabs a chipped copper teaspoon and a flimsy cheese grater. “Grate up.” 

He leans against the counter while Brian grates as fast as he can, which is not very fast at all using a cheese grater that keeps slipping from its upright position. It’s not exactly a Williams-Sonoma model. Or even an OXO one from Target. “Try turning the root ninety degrees,” Pat says quickly when the grater moves for the fifth time. He steps closer and—_ oh _—puts his hand over Brian’s to adjust the position of his root. The ginger, um. Root. “You want to go opposite of the grain to get as much as possible with each stroke. Otherwise, you’ll get tired before you’re done.”

_ Jesus. _

“Bold of you to assume I was intentionally going with the grain,” Brian says, proud of how his voice doesn’t crack. 

Pat chuckles and moves his hand, but he doesn’t step away or out of Brian’s space. It doesn’t feel threatening, but also, Brian’s not sure he could call it _comforting _either. He’s all up in Pat’s space a lot at work, hanging out at bars after, but this setting is way more intimate. He’s not even wearing shoes. It prickles Brian’s hair, raises some goosebumps.

Suddenly, he wishes he’d chosen another anti-anxiety brew. Or even a tincture to stop having a dumb stupid crush on your coworker.

When the grating is finished, Brian measures out four teaspoons of the ginger and dumps them into the bottom of the mason jar with a wet _thwunk_. “Two parts ginger, one part vanilla,” Brian says, his voice lilting up at the end with a question. But he can’t help doing a fist pump when Pat beams and nods. 

“Exactly,” Pat says, reaching around Brian’s left side to grab that small handful of dried leaves. “That good ol’ fashioned way of measuring shit: percentages.”

Brian points at Pat’s palm. “I don’t think I know what those are,” he says. “Vanilla and ginger I’ve got, but uh. It looks like cilantro, and I hate to tell you Pat Gill, but I am one of those people who feels like I got a big ol’ bar of soap in my gullet when I eat cilantro.”

“Well Brian, have I got news for you. It’s actually gingko.” Pat sprinkles the dried herb on the counter like that meme of the guy throwing salt. It’s a pretty close approximation, except for the beard and hair and everything else. “Good for energy, as ya do, but also good for circulation. And you’ll want one part gingko in the jar.” 

Brian purses his lips as he sprinkles some crushed gingko into the teaspoon, holding it so close to his face he could almost inhale it by accident. “I assume this is where the individualizing part comes in?” he asks. “Like, could you make this same concoction—”

“Tincture.”

“—with the ratios two-one-two, or one-two-two?”

Pat hums and scrapes some of the flyaway gingko and ginger bits into the sink to deal with later. “Sort of,” Pat says. “Like, neither of those combinations would harm you, but people prefer different strengths of the various shit. My mom adds more gingko because she uses this in the afternoon instead of coffee and wants it to be strong as fuck. But since I mainline caffeine, I don’t need the jitters that the gingko would give me. I _ do _however like more mental clarity when it’s slump time, so I add more vanilla to mine.” 

“Fascinating,” Brian breathes. He really hopes that after all this tomfoolery and deception is over, Pat will keep up the magic lessons. Teach Brian more about herbs at the very least. Maybe there’s some sort of mandragora _ Men In Black _memory-erasing pen thing where Pat will make Brian forget this ever happened, but Brian doesn’t think Pat will do him dirty like that. They’ve formed a sacred bond livestreaming together. Pat would at least give him a heads up if aurors or the Volturi or whoever was after him.

Brian tips the second teaspoon of gingko into the jar and then places the measuring spoon in the sink, even though he’s sure they’ll wash it like a hundred times before the afternoon is over. Pat tries to slide the bottle of bootleg Everclear down the counter, but Brian snatches it away before Pat can oopsie-daisy the bottle onto the floor. Not that Brian’s any less clumsy, but he also knows his strengths and weaknesses. 

“Fill the jar to the line,” Pat says, coming behind Brian again. “For some tinctures, it matters if you start with the ingredients or with alcohol, or if it’s boiling versus hot versus cold, but this one is pretty forgiving. It’s a little smoother if you add the ingredients first and then give them time to bloom as you fill the jar.” As Brian pours, Pat adds, “And then make sure to tap out the air bubbles as you can before you seal it up. We’re not trying to make penicillin.”

Brian presses his nose to the glass as the alcohol slowly fills the container. The _magic _filling up the jar, the spices and herbs infusing the liquid with their essence and shit. Hell yes. He wipes the mouth of the jar with one of the lovely kitchen towels, then knocks out the air bubbles and seals the lid. He pushes the jar a couple of inches away and takes a step back, staring intently, waiting for the trumpets and fanfare. 

It’s just a jar with stuff in it.

“Is it, uh.” Brian coughs. “Supposed to be doing something.”

“Not really,” Pat says, laughing as he inspects Brian’s handiwork. “Were you expecting fireworks or sparks or something?”

“Kinda!” Brian says, rolling up the towel so he can swat Pat’s arm with it. Pat laughs harder. “This is my first magic or whatever, I thought it’d be more impressive!”

“I’m but a simple plant,” Pat says, but he’s grinning. “Hate to break it to ya, but it gets even more boring from here: now it sits for like three weeks.”

Brian groans.

“But you _do _still want to place your intention in it, which I can help with. And that’s the real magic, anyway. The rest was making a tasty cocktail.”

Brian rolls his eyes and scoffs, but curls his hand around the jar to scoot it closer anyway. “Tell me what to do with my fancy liqueur.”

Pat gets all up in Brian’s space again, hovers for a second before gently folding Brian’s hands around the jar. Cupped like around a mug of cocoa. Pat keeps his palms there, purposeful and solid, and his warmth seeps down into Brian’s hands—and, ostensibly, into the glass as well. 

“Close your eyes and think about what you want to do with this tincture,” Pat says softly. “What you’d like the bits of the earth inside to do for you.” He waits until Brian follows along, barely peeking with squinted eyes at the way their hands fit together. “Even with spells, you can’t create or destroy matter; the energy goes somewhere else. When you infuse this liquid with magic, you take that energy from other parts of the earth. So you have to be thankful.”

Brian closes his eyes, no cheating this round. He feels silly, like the first time he tried meditating and didn’t know how that was any different than talking to himself. But Pat’s hands shift on Brian’s, and he feels _warmer _somehow. Like Pat’s pressing more of his warmth into Brian’s hands. _ Magic_, Brian thinks, then, _ oh right I’m supposed to be setting an intention. Hm. _

He falters, though hopefully Pat can’t hear his breathing stutter._ I’d really appreciate an energy boost? _ he thinks purposefully, pressing his fingertips into the glass. _ Uh, if you please_, he adds. _ I know you’ve probably got a lot of energy you need to put elsewhere to, y’know. Stop climate change. So thank you. _

There still aren’t any sparks or fireworks or triumphant noises, but Brian does admit (even if it’s a placebo, even if it’s because he’s wishing so hard) that it feels like a tangible _something _transfers from his hand into the jar. Energy, or heat (or are those the same thing? Brain can’t really remember his last physics course), or _magic _spreads out and fills the available space, much like the liquid had done before.

“That’s it,” Pat breathes, so quick and close. The hairs on the back of Brian’s neck stand up. It’s intimate, the caress of his breath, the soft words and gentle touches. 

Brian fumbles the jar as he sets it back down with a too-forceful push. The tension in the moment snaps, the kitchen returns to normal except Pat’s still a plant and Brian’s now a witch. “And now we wait?” Brian asks.

“And now we wait,” Pat confirms. He drums his fingers on the counter like he does his desk at work when he’s editing a video of himself. “For that one, at least. We’ve got a few more tinctures to make, you’ve got some root properties to memorize, and then we can move on to some other dope shit.”

\---

They end up using most of the cuttings and one and a half containers of alcohol to make the rest of the tinctures. Pat explains that he was running low on stuff since he hadn’t had a ton of magic to spare for a restock (“Like mugwort?” “Absolutely mugwort.”). Brian makes one tincture with star anise, peppermint, and peach blossoms for skin irritation; one for anxiety with chamomile, lavender, and lemon balm. Pat even shows him how to make a quick tea with any of the same parts, which won’t be as effective as the tincture but would certainly get the job done in a pinch. They both enjoy a mug of an energy-boosting tea that Pat lets Brian craft for himself based on what Brian’s learned. (“And we can’t use what we did before,” Pat had said, “Because it’ll taste like absolute dog shit. When you’re making a tea, you gotta pick stuff that’ll taste good together.”) Pat looks pleased when Brian picks thyme, strawberry leaves, and ginger. It’s heavy on the ginger, when they finally take a sip, but definitely still drinkable. And while the effect isn’t as immediate as when Brian drank Pat’s anxiety tea yesterday, as he gets a flavor of the thyme on the back of his palate, he does, in fact, feel a little more awake.

“Pretty good, you witchy wunderkind,” Pat says, taking another sip. “The first tea I made had garlic in it because I was a dumbass. I drank it out of spite because my stepdad said I wouldn’t.”

“He sounds like a real piece of work,” Brian says, treading carefully, though he can definitely pick up context clues. He sounds like a real piece of work.

“Actually, he’s a real piece of shit,” Pat says. Then he sighs, runs a hand through his hair. “No, that’s unfair. We don’t see eye to eye on literally anything. And it’s not even some weird resentment about him being my stepdad. He makes my mom happy, so whatever. But he always thinks he knows better than me about my life, and I’m—I know that makes me sound like a rebellious teen in a John Hughes movie, but it drives me up the wall. He’s _ the worst _.”

“I’ll fight him,” Brian says. “And his familiar. If we’re still following Harry Potter rules, I could definitely take him in a fight with my one day of magic learning.”

“You’re the brightest witch of your age,” Pat says in a godawful cockney accent. Then his mouth quirks unexpectedly into a frown. “I hope, uh. I thought about this after you left, but I wanted to make sure to say today, that um. Th- that _witch _is gender-neutral. It’s not like, the term for a female magic user.”

Brian smiles. “I had picked that up from context clues,” he says. “But thanks for clarifying, Pat Gill. You’re a good one.”

“I’m a _ decent _one, at best,” Pat says, and Brian thinks, _ you’re right but you shouldn’t say it_. Brian’s met a lot of indecent people. Pat adds, “It has more to do with the type of magic someone does and a level of gravitas. Like, okay, another reason my stepdad chaps my damn ass? He claims he’s a wizard, but everyone knows he’s just a witch.”

“Does he- does he put on his—hah—does he put on his robe and wizard hat?” 

Pat _cackles_, leans slightly away from Brian and brings his fist to his mouth like he’s about to cough. It’s infectious, a warm bubbly feeling that spreads Brian’s mouth into a grin before he consciously tells it to smile. Like the pop and fizz of a Diet Coke, Pat’s laugh. 

“Okay you’re joking,” Pat says, wiping a tear from his eye as he bumps his glasses, “but _literally yes_. He’s gonna show up in some absolute rotisserie shithead clothes and we’re gonna have to pretend like it’s totally normal. His- god, his familiar is even worse though. An even crispier shithead. _ God, _I hate them so much.”

“I’m so glad to be, uh, undercooked with you,” Brian says. “Just a couple raw boneless skinless shitheads.”

Pat grins, poking his tongue in the corner of his lips in a way that makes Brian desperate to kiss it back into his mouth. “Yummy yummy,” Pat moans, immediately followed by a wince. He takes a sip of his tea to cover it. Which is good, for Brian, because even Pat’s joking moans are enough to make his cheeks flush these days. He’s really gotta get his shit together.

“What’s next, my guy?” he asks, twisting to sit cross-legged and fact Pat. “I’m ready for the big leagues. Put me in, coach!”

Pat slips into what Brian thinks is either his Randy Savage or Hulk Hogan impression—Brian’s watched some WWE so he can get some of Pat’s references, but he still can’t tell the voices apart. “You’re gonna saw a lady in half, _ oh yeah_,” Pat says. Then he sets his tea down. “N-no, actually, I’m gonna have to boost your magic a bit before we do anything more exciting than tinctures. Normally this would be, like, everything you’d learn in your first year at Hogwarts to put it in your terms—”

“Thanks, Patrick, for appealing to the millennial voters out here.”

“—but I’m gonna jam ya full of Michael’s Secret Stuff and hope that works?” His voice flips up at the end, completely unsure. 

It’s not like Brian was _confident _before, but at least Pat had seemed like he knew what he was doing. _ Hoping _this will work yanks all the confidence Brian had right out from under him like a 1920’s magician’s tablecloth. Some of that must show on his face because Pat stutters and stumbles to reassure him, “I mean again, it’s not gonna _kill _you or anything, not like blowing a fuse, but I don’t. I don’t, uh, know if me givin’ ya a boost’ll help you search inside yourself for you latent magic. It’s very inward and you can’t rush that.”

Brian picks at a piece of lint on his jeans, or possibly he starts fraying a part of his jeans that was perfectly fine and dandy. There’s definitely no way to know. “Pat, I’ve—I can’t even meditate, not really. I can’t shut my brain off, and I know that’s the point of meditating, to get better at it, but then I get anxiety about not meditating right. And then I start thinking there’s something wrong with my noggin, and _ then _ I’m more unfocused than when I started, Pat!” He takes a big breath. “And then, Pat—then. Now I’ve gotta not only look inside m’self, but also _do magic _with what I find? Pat!”

He’s spiraling, he can feel it—maybe his choice for tea really should have been something anti-anxiety after all, but Pat takes Brian’s hand and places it on his own chest. It’s warm, shockingly so, and Brian stops himself from blurting _is your homeostasis the same if you’re a plant _because Pat’s taking slow, exaggerated, purposeful, definitely-a-CBT-breathing-exercise breaths.

“Brian, match my breaths,” Pat says. He takes another round of long, slow inhales followed by loud exhales. Brian copies him, shaky and withering. “Normally I’m the first to give up when the going gets tough, but we can fucking do this. We’ve already boosted your access to the arcane arts with the tinctures, so you should be able to find the magic inside you no problem. I’ve never done this before.”

“The magic was inside me all along?” Brian asks weakly, still trying to get his breathing under control. His ears are somehow ringing and muffled at the same time, what the hell. Everything’s narrowed to Pat’s hand, his face, the stuttery rise and fall of Brian’s chest. He hasn’t had an attack like this in _months_—at least since after his first few weeks at Polygon. It certainly can’t be good for the shingles.

“Maybe the real magic,” Pat replies, cutting through the static noise, “was the friends we made along the way.”

“Fuck you, Pat.”

“You either die a witch or live long enough to see yourself become a wizard.”

“Patrick.” He’s mad that it’s working, that he’s smiling, dammit. 

“You’d have made a pretty good witch yourself, Hans.”

“Okay, okay, you Done. Got. Me, Pat,” Brian says. He takes another round of slow breaths just to be sure, but his heart doesn’t feel like it’s about to beat out of his chest anymore. “Thank you. Gimme a couple of seconds and then you can boost the fuck out of m— nope.”

“Nope,” Pat agrees.

Pat places both of their mugs in the sink and verbally directs Brian to where Pat keeps his yoga mat (under the bed, gathering an ungodly amount of dust). It clearly hasn’t been used in some time, so either Pat doesn’t need to access the magic inside himself, or if it’s been that long since Pat’s had someone to access it with. Interesting.

Nope. Moving on.

The beginning part Brian’s familiar with: the sitting, the closing his eyes, the breathing. He’s relatively good at all three of those things on their own. He loves a good sit. But that’s about as far as he typically gets when meditating. He’d downloaded an app a few years ago to try and get better at meditating, but it only made him get better at wasting money on app subscriptions. 

Brian rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck left to right, keeps his eyes closed because you’re supposed to do that. Sits cross-legged because you’re supposed to do that, too. The anxiety grips tight around his lungs—trying to let his thoughts go makes him think _harder _about what he’s supposed to be doing, what he’d not doing, what Pat’s stepdad must be like to instill this type of fear, what Brian’s stepdad would be like in this same scenario, whether Moose would be magical or not, whether Brother Patrick would be a witch or if witches even need lawyers in the first place. 

Pat takes a few deep, purposeful breaths, and without him saying anything, Brian tries to match him again.

“I’m gonna walk you through how to access your magic,” Pat says, his voice coming from just to Brian’s left. Pat must be kneeling up on the yoga mat, or off to the side. It takes all of Brian’s power not to crack open one sleepy eye at Pat. Meditating. Eyes closed. “The kitchen witchery earlier helped strengthen the connection inside ya, so it should be easier for you to find that part of yourself. Try to push all other sensations away and feel inside yourself—_ don’t fucking laugh _—for the magic.”

“Well Pat, I hope you’re gonna turn away while I _ feel inside myself_,” Brian says, and despite his earlier warnings, Pat does fucking laugh.

“I don’t know how else to describe it, dude!” Pat says, snickering. He gently bumps Brian’s shoulder in an approximation of a punch. “It’s like, uh. When you try to explain to someone how you _see _pictures inside your brain when you’re not actually seeing anything. But also the pictures are magic.”

Brian can’t roll his eyes, but boy does he hope he’s projecting that energy. “Okay, okay,” he says. “What am I looking for?”

“As I understand it, it’ll feel like a rope or column in the core of your self.” Pat grins wryly and fumbles around, touching his clothes as he looks for something. “I’m aware this all sounds like New Age, hippie-dippie garbage, but it’s also. Not _not _like that, y’know? I mean, I _ am _about to hand you a crystal.”

That does get Brian to open his eyes. “Oh my god.”

Pat uses his surprise to plop a small, round red stone into Brian’s lap. “Technically not a crystal,” Pat says. “I mean, I’ve got some clear quartz I could hand ya, but I’d be afraid it’d boost your power too much and you’d burn down the building or something.”

“Oh my _ god _.”

“This amber, though, should help clear your mind. Especially since it sounds like you’ve got shit-ass luck with meditating.”

Brian sniffs. “Only _ I _can talk about my shit-ass luck with meditating, Patrick, how dare you,” he says, feeling over the crystal once he plucks it from between his legs. The amber, not the crystal, he supposes. It’s smooth, round. No mosquitos in it, no premonitions of yet another Jurassic Park sequel in Pat’s apartment. Just the way Brian likes it. 

“Okay, so I’m just. Gonna close my eyes and hold this rock and find the magic within me—Pat this hasn’t all been a scam to get me to join your MLM downline, right? You’re not gonna take me to a business seminar after, _ right _?”

“Oh but _ Brian_, you’re so close to becoming a Silver Rewards Member,” Pat says, gesturing so wide that his shoulder bumps into Brian’s bicep. “You only need to recruit five more boss babes to get the pink cauldron.”

The laugh from _that _one takes Pat at least five minutes to recover from though Brian’s barely any better. He has to wipe tears from his eyes before he’s in the realm of possibly meditating. Pat keeps snickering silently like he forgets his own joke for a minute and then suddenly remembers it for the first time all over again. Brian glares at him twice before Pat can reasonably keep it together long enough to say, “Okay, yeah, you uh—close your eyes again and search inside yourself for the thread of your magic. It’s usually a color, something that feels energetic and full of life for you.”

Brian exhales, gives Pat one last withering stare, and closes his eyes.

He has his standard meditation issues, certainly. The yoga mat is leaving weird dents in his butt, he can feel it. Pat’s AC is loud and obnoxious and bothersome. Charles is scratching himself somewhere, and he hopefully doesn’t have fleas. Brian’s childhood cat had fleas and it was such a nightmare, he kept getting bitten on his ankles when he’d go to sleep, so bad that he thought he got chickenpox every single night, until—

No. Breathe. In and out. 

Brian’s tried guided meditations in therapy before, where he’s had to picture himself in a comfortable room to allow himself a safe space to process. It’s been a good anxiety tool even if he can’t really get the meditating down, to picture himself in a quiet place when he starts feeling bad. So he starts off there, his safe space: a moss-covered forest, the air cool and smelling of vetiver and petrichor, the twilight approaching but not dangerously fast. Brian sits cross-legged on a log with the not-unpleasant scratchiness of some bark under his thighs. His body wants to linger, feel the moss between his bare toes, search for the doe who protects him like one of her fawns. 

But he can’t linger. So Brian takes a deep breath, releases it. With that, the scene fades away, dissolving until it’s just Brian. And then until it’s. Brian, but within. He gets what Pat means now, reaching inside himself. It’s unfortunately not as horny as it sounded. It’s dark, like he’s been blindfolded, and Brian has a passing thought about how maybe this is the horny part, except then he sees something faint a flickering, like a candle flame, far in the—distance? It’s hard to describe, even to his own brain, his own self, but he tries to move closer because it’s the only reference point he has in the darkness. The flicker is warm, inviting, perhaps a little stale and rusty from disuse, but still a welcoming presence. A lantern guiding him home, he would say, if he were still in an English course.

What comes into view is a taut rope, orange and almost bioluminescent in the dark. It reminds Brian of the gold thread in the Disney _ Hercules _movie, the fates with their one eye and their big important fuck-off pair of scissors. But there aren't any scissors here, and this doesn’t feel like _time _as much as it feels like _space _or _movement_. The column rises from the ether and stretches into the cosmos, and all of it beautiful and inside Brian, and all of its blackness except the light it radiates. It’s not particularly bright, just the soft warm glow of a nightlight, but it still feels good when Brian stretches his hand toward it for warmth.

“Did you find it?” Pat murmurs, and his voice seems to somehow come from all around Brian all at once. It’s resonant and smooth and as pleasing as it always is. Echoey and billowy all at once, a flowing cloak and a low-thrumming of a bell. It’s perfect.

“Yes,” Brian whispers. He’s afraid to do anything louder in this space. He’s not even sure if the noise actually came out of his mouth, or if he imagined it did, but Pat seems to hear him all the same.

“Brian, that’s cool as shit, dude,” Pat says. “What does it look like?”

“Peaceful,” Brian whispers. “Soft. I can’t believe this is. Inside me? Metaphorically?”

“And physically,” Pat says, then adds, “Don’t think about it too much.” There’s silence for a moment longer, maybe two hours or maybe two quick inhales, as Brian moves around the rope, circumnavigating it to get an idea of it from all sides. It doesn’t change its glow, no matter how he looks at it.

“I’m going to place my hand on your shoulder now,” Pat says, and Brian’s glad he had the warning because he still startles a bit, even with the heads up. If it had been sudden, it would have knocked him out of this weird, somehow successful meditative state. “And I’m gonna try and boost your magic so it’ll be even easier to access tomorrow. Let me know if you see anything change.”

Brian watches the orange light flicker, pulse, then stretch on again with no beginning or end. It doesn’t—Brian’s only known it for a few seconds, but it feels the same as it always has. 

“It feels the same as it always has,” he murmurs, spinning around it again.

He hears Pat say _ son of a bird _under his breath, and Brian doesn't know if he _actually _smiles or if just Inside Brian smiles, but the happiness that spills through him feels a bit like magic, too.

“Okay, what about now?” Pat says, and his voice is louder, closer, the timbre echoing through the halls like an old cathedral, like the ones Brain saw in Europe. Pat feels more present like he’s speaking from inside Brian’s body even if he’s clearly not—_ is he? _—but it’s disconcerting and comforting at the same time. Which could really describe all of Brian’s time with Pat, every episode of Gill and Gilbert. Brian studies the rope, and he thinks there might be a flash for one moment, but then he blinks, resets, and it’s still the same.

“Nope,” Brian says, popping the _ p _so it echoes and bounces. He runs his hand around the outside of the rope, not touching but—examining. It’s freezing cold and burning hot at the same time, the sensations prickling against his metaphysical self before neutralizing into something like the shock of static electricity, or maybe a hundred jellyfish. There’s a bit of resistance against his body like the light’s trying to hold a shape, but it feels warped and strange the closer he gets. The rope vibrates for a moment when he gets too close, so Brian pulls his hand back and clutches it to his chest. It settles, same light, same stretch into the unknown. 

“Pat, nothing, it’s not—” Brian takes a deep breath, in, out, tries to stop the panic. “Nothing’s changing.”

Pat swears again. This one's less funny. “Shit, Brian, um. Let me. Think, let me think for a second.” His voice goes empty. Brian can still feel the hand on his shoulder, Pat’s grounding presence like a copper rod, but his voice disappears as Pat, presumably, thinks for a second. 

Brian stares at the taut rope, the gentle light, the way it feels like an old friend yet also someone he’s never met before. It’s intoxicating and joyful, exuberant. How he feels when he makes music: elated, vibrant, more at home in his skin than he is at any other time. Surrounded by other people yet doing something fully for himself, or sitting in emptiness but feeling connected to thousands of people making the same notes with their mouths and hands and bodies. He could write an entire _opera _about this space in his head, the column of light, and if Jonah got involved they could really get a good jam sesh going. Brian and his magical rope, strumming along to the—

Wait.

Brian takes another deep breath, tilts his view, looks at the rope from a 45-degree angle. And then it’s obvious, so obvious—_ not a rope at all _—that he doesn’t take a second to think about the ramifications of doing such a thing before.

He plucks the string.

He creates music.

There’s a hair’s breadth of time and space where everything is perfectly silent, just Brian and the ripple of his magic. But then time moves, as it’s wont to do, and Brian’s body shifts, and then it really is like a gong in his head. A great fucking gong bouncing off his skull, visible sound waves traveling into the darkness at the same instant there’s a _ flash _of light like a camera. The string grows brighter and brighter, like the sun, like a thousand suns, until it’s so bright that he has to close his eyes—

Which means _opening _his eyes—

Which means _lurching _forward, gasping, his shirt soaked with sweat, his hands clawing at anything they can—oh, _ Patrick_, in his earthly flesh, his hands solid and safe around Brian’s shoulders.


	4. Part 2 - 2/2

Somehow they make it to the bed. Somehow Pat must get Brian up onto his feet—_he’s sweating, god, why is he so sweaty, just two sweaty men carrying each other_—and drag him, stumbling, to his bed.

“Pat, what—happening?” Brian’s mouth feels like it’s full of marbles and cotton, his vowels rounded and muffled around the weight of his tongue.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Pat soothes, brushing Brian’s hair out of his face, god, just so fucking sweaty. “I think you overexerted—you were down there for a long time, first time really using your magic that’s—it’s a lot if your body isn’t used to it.”

“I touched it, I think.” His head hurts, a thumping on the inside of his skull, bells ringing and ringing. “Wh-what time is it?”

“Like nine-something,” Pat says. He must move away for a second, but Brian’s eyes are closed so he can’t see where. Gosh does he wish Pat would come back. “I’m still here,” Pat says, and oh that must have been out loud. Hm, that’s gonna be a problem if sometimes his inside voice is also his outside voice. There’s secret stuff in there. 

“How’re you—I got worried when, just such a long time.”

“Got hit by a truck,” Brian whines. He thinks he’s allowed some whining. “Am I a witch now?”

“It would appear so!!” Pat says, frantic, like he’s barely keeping it together for Brian’s sake. Oh, he didn’t have to do that, he can freak out too, then they can be freaked out together. “Brian we should—I think you should try to get some sleep, let your body finish sorting itself out.”

“Already there, buddy,” Brian replies, still a little marble-mouthed, still feeling like his hands are made of sandstone and his body’s a hot air balloon poorly tethered to the ground. “Can I. Oh, be a bad guest and just—mmkay, gonna fall asleep here.”

Pat chuckles, a little wet sounding as if he were crying—_why’s he sad?—_but Brian can’t open his eyes to check. “Yeah of course,” he says. “Would you—I can sleep on the couch, let me grab one of my pillows.”

“Silly,” Brian scoffs, “Charlie won’t let you share the couch. Here.” Brian manages to flop one of his arms in what he hopes is a vague gesture at the bed. It sort of flops on top of his cheek, boneless. 

“I—okay, but if—”

“Stay with me,” Brian says, and it’s pleading and a little soft—and even in his state, Brian’s a bit embarrassed by how it’s showing his whole-ass vulnerable ass. “Please, Pat I—don’t leave me alone.”

Pat shifts on the bed, must be lying down on his side. Brian hopes he’s on the other side of the bed and not taking Pat’s side. “Of course, yeah,” Pat says. “Whatever you need.”

“Need you,” Brian says. He smacks his lips. “And in a coupla hours, maybe an Excedrin.”

“I got the hookup, my guy,” Pat whispers conspiratorially. Then adds, “Can I—do you want to borrow a pair of pajamas?”

“No time,” Brian says. He finds the strength to pop his button and take down the fly but doesn’t attempt to wiggle out of his jeans. That’s a Future Brian problem and Present Brian’s allll good over here. “Gonna _snnnz _now, k goodnight Patrick.”

Pat laughs again, that wet one, and Brian’s already halfway out so he can’t analyze what that means. “Goodnight, Present Brian.”

Brian wakes up fitfully, his legs tangled in the sheets, cool and damp with his jeans suctioned to his body. He grumbles and wriggles his hips, somehow gets his jeans off—though not without waking Pat when he accidentally elbows Pat in the stomach. 

Brian kicks his jeans toward the foot of the bed and tucks his damp legs under the covers again. “Wha’ time ‘zit?” Brian mumbles, rolling onto his other side, creaking his eye open slightly—ah, he’s facing the window, and it’s still dark, though New York dark where there’s still thousands of lights blazing in the sky. 

“Three a.m.,” Pat murmurs, his voice sleep-thick and scratchy. He must be facing the other way, curled up on the other side of the bed. Brian feels a bit better, but not better enough to roll over and check. 

“The witching hour,” Brian whispers.

“Too fucking early,” Pat whispers back.

And then Brian’s out again.

Brian wakes for real five hours later to an empty bed and the sounds of someone making coffee in the kitchen. He groans and rubs his hands over his eye sockets, pressing in slightly as if that’ll either wake him up or make his head stop hurting. It’s no longer pounding, just a dull ache, but it’s persistent and annoying and still there when Brian sits up and rolls his shoulders, stretches his neck. If this is what it feels like all the time to be magical, no thank you. Hard pass.

He finds his jeans in a crumpled ball near the foot of the bed and pulls them on, cringing at the stiff fabric and the mortifying ordeal of being in your boxer briefs in someone else’s house. Pat probably didn’t see anything untoward, but Brian’s not typically a _pants-off sleepover _guy on the first date. Not that this was a date at all. More like when you crash at a friend’s place after drinking too much, or when you pass out from doing magic so good that your head metaphorically explodes.

Brian edges around the partial-wall separating the bedroom area from the rest of the apartment, and Pat is, as guessed, standing over a pot of coffee in the kitchen. Two mugs rest on the counter waiting to be filled with nature’s sweet brew. Brian tries to think of something cute or witty to say to alert Pat to his presence, but that takes more brainpower than he currently has in his various precarious states. So he just says, “Morning.” Both a greeting and a statement. It is, in fact, morning.

Pat looks up and smiles, bright and warm, though it wavers a bit as his eyes drag over Brian’s face, his body, checking to make sure everything’s where he left it. Brian’s not sure that he _is _where Pat left him, maybe all of his atoms got shifted one atom to the left, or upside down, or something. He has a _column _of _fire _in his body now. 

“Morning,” Pat agrees carefully, softly. “You slept for like eleven hours.”

“I could probably sleep for eleven more,” Brian says, padding over to the kitchen when the coffee pot beeps, “but that would not be good for my whole general _thing_.”

“Probably not.” Pat places his hand on Brian’s shoulder, warm and heavy and firm. “How, uh, how are you feeling this morning?”

“Magical,” Brian says, and then—ah, fuck yes—he spots the bottle of Excedrin on the counter. “About to get even _more _magical as soon as I pop these suckers.” He dumps two into the palm of his hand and knocks them back, chasing them with a cup of coffee that Pat slides in front of him. It’s hot, and it burns his mouth, but it’s _so_ worth it when the placebo effect of medicine kicks in. “I’m sure you had a witchy headache cure in your cabinet somewhere, but—”

“Sometimes you just need the good stuff,” Pat says, shaking the bottle. “Plus sometimes you get a migraine at work and don’t have any tinctures in your backpack.”

They lapse into silence, drinking coffee as Charles bumps against Brian’s leg for morning pets, then gets more insistent about _no, it’s time for head scritches_. It’s soft and companionable, Pat humming to himself as he washes last night’s dishes in the sink. Brian moves some of yesterday’s tinctures out of the way, off to the side of the counter where Charles won’t knock them over. There’s so much of this, the magic, the softness, that Pat’s hidden of himself at work. Sure, Pat’s not _aggro_, but there’s a difference between drinking ‘respect women’ juice and talking softly to an air plant on the fridge that looks like it’s seen better days. Apparently even plants aren’t great at taking care of plants. Brian’s heart grows three sizes when Pat mutters, _well that’s just rude, I gave you a bath on Saturday_, to presumably the plant.

Pat doesn’t get out much, it seems. 

“I got a text from my stepdad this morning,” Pat says when he finishes his morning green thumbing and returns to the counter to drain his coffee. He leans on his elbows scant inches away from Brian’s face. It’s a lot to handle before nine a.m. “Or a _missive _as he calls it. He’s made dinner reservations at six so we’ve got like nine hours to get you in fighting shape.”

“I think you mean _witching shape_,” Brian says, then frowns. “I should probably call out of work again today, I feel like a garbage hole.”

“Yeah, that’s—I mean, I was gonna suggest it even if you didn’t.” Pat grimaces and runs his fingers through his hair, pushes it out of his eyes. He looks so tired. No, not tired. _Exhausted_. “I’m sorry, this was already asking so much of you and now I’m—I know you were planning to take a vacation after E3 and I don’t want m-my dumb ass to be the reason you miss that.”

Brian waves a hand dismissively. “Pat, I’d pretend to be a witch for any of my friends. That’s just the kinda guy I am.” Well maybe not _any _of his friends, but certainly for Pat. Especially since it’s an emergency. “You can make it up to me by inviting me to whatever Friendsgiving you and Simone end up having this year.”

“It’s a date,” Pat says, then quickly takes a sip of his coffee. Brian follows suit, scalding his tongue a bit. “So, magic lessons?”

“I’m uh, I’m gonna be honest Pat Gill: probably not without some breakfast in my belly. Or that Excedrin's gonna rip. me. _up. _in like twenty minutes.”

“Oops! Uh-oh!”

\---

Pat ends up being truly one of the greats when he offers to get them some food so Brian doesn’t need to manage the stairs in his current condition. Which, okay, may have only been because Brian hissed and rubbed his back when he bent over to lace up his sneaks. Brian cracks like three bones he didn’t even know he had when he stands up, and Pat waves Brian off as he heads out the door—says something about _egg sammies_ _gotta go _when Brian implies Pat’s not any better off, that they should stick together. _That’s the first rule of a horror mo- okay bye Pat Gill._

Brian uses the time to email Tara from his phone, replying to yesterday’s thread with another email that just says _not better!!!! _And then below, _I think I’m gonna take the day to recoup and keep everyone from getting sick. I already got to Pat and I don’t want the whole video team out next week. I’ll be available via email though if there’s a video game emergency._

He gets a reply from Tara (_Gross. Feel better, please don’t breathe on me_.) as Pat walks back in the apartment with two grease-stained brown paper bags. Perfect. Sustenance. Pat grabbed him two bagel breakfast sandwiches, one jalapeno cheddar, one _a little milder for your tummy_ though it’s still slathered with hot sauce. Pat knows him so well. 

Brian gets covered in hot sauce and cream cheese, just frickin’ all over his face and hands, and he’s glad he’s stopped trying to impress Pat at every turn because damn—the last twenty-four hours have been truly anything but impressive. What with the fainting and bleeding and all. Pat just laughs and chucks Brian a paper towel, which Brian smears all over the lower half of his face. “Thanks, Pat!” Brian says with his mouth full, and Pat replies, mouth equally full, “Of course my dude!”

The morning quickly becomes an _If You Give A Mouse A Cookie _situation because once Brian’s belly is full and the caffeine-plus-Excedrin kick in, he realizes how stank nasty his whole situation is and desperately wants to take a shower. Pat, bless him, lets Brian borrow a t-shirt and a pair of boxers (a true friend, Brian thinks while half asleep; super hot, Brian thinks once he’s in a mental state to do so) and says Brian can use as much hot water as he’d like. And _then_ once Brian’s had a shower, he needs to brush his teeth and lotion up so his skin doesn’t get all itchy, so Pat lets Brian have a clean toothbrush from the cabinet. He also pulls out a weird tube of UDDER CREAM from the lower cabinet, and it’s only because Pat’s already doing so much for Brian that Brian doesn’t comment that Pat uses a brand of lotion called UDDER CREAM. At least go for Working Hands if you need your lotion to be hyper masc.

Finally, over an hour of scrubbing and primping later—along with sending several texts to his roommate group chat about how he and Pat got the stomach flu so they’re gonna ride it out together—Brian’s ready to get some work done for the day. Pat’s cleared a larger space in his main living area and pushed his couch and table up against the window (which Charlie is taking advantage of to lay in a sunbeam) so they have space to do _real magic shit_. That’s what Pat says, even waggling his eyebrows as he says it. 

Brian’s not sure if he’s ready to do real magic shit, but he’s at the very least ready to try.

“So uh. Welcome to Pat’s Magic School,” Pat says, folding his hands on his lap as if it were a desk. “I’m Pat—”

“Hi Pat!”

“—and here’s your history of magic lesson: magic’s been around a long time. And now,” Pat says, “onto the good shit.”

“Hell yeah.”

Pat sits on the arm of the couch, apparently getting into _cool teacher _mode. That didn’t take long. “One of the easiest things to do involves changing the temperature of something. Usually, uh. You. Making yourself warmer or colder depending on, say, what the restaurant’s like inside. It’s second nature for a witch to make themself more comfortable. Barely takes any magic at all.”

“Starting at the very beginning, a very good place to start,” Brian sings softly.

“I grabbed a cinnamon infusion I made last winter while you were in the shower,” Pat says, shaking a small amber bottle with an eyedropper for a lid. “This is all I’ve got left, but the good news is that New York is hot as fuck now so I don’t need any for a while. It should help you with this first part.”

“What do I need to do?” Brian asks. “Some—heh—some warmups?”

He does a couple of squats followed by a big ass toe-touch jump, his signature move. It has the desired effect: Pat snorts but adds some high kicks to the routine for good measure. _Hah, hoo-ah!_

“Okay now that we’re _limber_,” Pat says, grinning, “stick your tongue out.”

“Ooh, _Patrick_,” Brian drawls, dipping into a Southern accent he’s never managed to perfect, “at least ask me to dinner first—” And then he drops out of it just as fast with, “—wait I guess you did, in fact, ask me to dinner first, just kidding.”

“_Brian_.”

“_Pat_.”

Pat huffs, unable to take the heat he dished out. Back on his bullshit. “I’m gonna put some drops of this on your tongue. It should make some warmth, from the cinnamon, spread through your body.” Pat removes the eyedropper full of reddish liquid. It looks. Spooky. “Then you’ll try to recreate the effect with your magic, pulling on the heat from the cinnamon to keep warming yourself. Eventually,” Pat adds, releasing the liquid back into the bottle, “you want to get to a place where you don’t need the cinnamon at all and you can just pull the heat from the air.”

“Sounds simple,” Brian says, nodding. He pushes his glasses back up on his nose. “Turn m’self into a roasty toasty fire.”

Pat grimaces. “Please not a fire,” he says quickly. “I don’t think this is gonna happen because like, you don’t have the ability yet, but uh. _Theoretically,_ you could grab too much heat and spontaneously combust.”

“_Jesus_,” Brian says.

“Or you could remove too much heat and freeze yourself to death. It’s, again—we’re not gonna do anything remotely close,” Pat adds quickly, “but magic is dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Brian reaches out and grabs Pat’s shoulder, warm under his palm even through the second gamer tee in 48 hours. “I’ll be so careful,” Brian says. “This is gonna work and it’s gonna be fine!”

Pat flinches away and laughs, high and tight in his throat as he sinks down onto the couch. “Right, right, yeah I’m—sorry, I’m ten kinds of nervous and also I’ve never taught anyone how to do magic, so I’m afraid you’re gonna, like, accidentally throw a fireball in here or something.” Brian reaches out again, but Pat’s got his shoulders hunched up to his ears, all clenched in such a stark departure from his open-loose gangliness that it throws Brian for a loop, his hand hovering in empty space as Pat looks down at the floor and sighs, adds, “Which would _not _necessarily get my stepdad off my case and also it might actually kill you? I’m—” He pauses, shuffles the balls of his feet on the hardwood floor. “Brian, you’re—I can’t lose you.”

The air _wooshes_ out of Brian’s lungs, loud and sudden though Brian tries to cover it with an equally large inhale. Just taking some calming breaths over here, no one’s world is getting flipped upside down, not at all. He sits cross-legged on the yoga mat and reaches out one hand palm up—this time, Pat grabs it. 

“Now it’s my turn to tell you to fuckin’ breathe,” Brian says, chuckling when Pat quirks a wry smile up at him. “You’re not gonna lose me. You’re gonna teach me how to warm myself up, and then _later _you can show me how to throw a fireball because, hey Pat? _Pat_? That sounds rad as _fuck_.”

Pat lifts his head and wipes the back of his eye with his knuckle, oh gosh. “Thanks, I—_whoo _sort of a lot, huh?” Pat asks rhetorically, though Brian nods along. Definitely sort of a lot, Patrick. “Let’s, um. Let’s start with witch lesson oh-point-three: getting a safe level of toasty. A nice buttery piece of toast with no charred bits.”

“I will do my best to keep my bits untoasted,” Brian assures him, finally—oh, finally letting go of Pat’s hand. He places them both on his knees where they can’t get into any trouble. “Uncooked chicken breasts, remember.”

“Right,” Pat says, in his Michael Caine impression. “Oh-kay, let’s get going.” 

Brian sticks out his tongue without comment for the first time in his life and Pat places three drops of the tincture into his mouth. It burns a bit like—well, like cinnamon, but closer to when Brian and his brother used to dare each other to hold red hots in their mouths for as long as possible. The warmth quickly spreads out and down from his tongue, zipping through his body like electricity as it rushes out to his fingers and toes. 

Pat takes up his position on the couch again, tucks his legs up under himself while Brian's tongue burns in a not-unpleasant way. 

“Okay, has the warmth settled?” Pat asks. “It should like, chill out—_hah_—in a moment if it hasn’t. Not be so frenetic.”

It’s true: the zipping calms and sinks into Brian’s body like a muscle rub, warm and pleasant. “Yeah it feels nice,” Brian says, stretching out his fingers. “Soothing.”

“Mmkay perfect. Now close your eyes and focus just on the sensation of that warmth until it’s all you can feel. Until you understand how it flows through your body. And then use your magic to give it a lil boost and warm yourself up even more.”

Brian exhales and places his palms face down on his crossed knees, closes his eyes, sinks down into that meditative state—hell yes—and then deeper again until he can travel along his limbs in search of the warmth. It’s remarkably easy to find, seeped into every bit of skin as it is. “Got it,” Brian says softly, for Pat’s benefit. Pat hums, far away. 

It’s hard to explain, even to himself, but Brian shuts everything else out like noise-canceling headphones and tries to get both inside and around the feeling, as though he wanted to tangibly touch the warmth in this secret place. Like he had with his magic yesterday, the warmth crescendoing as Brian spreads his metaphysical fingers out to feel the different notes of the cinnamon. _Heat _and _comfort _and _safety _coming together like root, major third, perfect fifth and resonate through his body, vibrating each cell. It’s beautiful and simplistic, not overstated in the slightest.

Brian’s always been good at sightreading.

He sinks deeper and deeper, then, back to the orange string of his magic. It’s—_Christ_, it’s so bright now. Lava instead of a nightlight. If it’s Pat’s influence, or if that’s what happens when you poke the sleeping bear of your magic, Brian doesn’t know. But good gravy, it’s easier to _see _down there at the very least.

“Okay,” Pat says, echoing around him again. “To do this, you’ll need to take a bit—and I cannot stress this enough—a _bit _of your magic and think about that warmth like you want to stoke the fire to keep the night away. In the- the future, you can create warmth without the tincture at all, but it’s helpful to start.”

Brian nods, at least internally if not externally. He considers the string in much the same way he did yesterday, moving around, mindful of the increased glow. It doesn’t feel any _hotter_, but Brian’s magic lessons so far have been pretty _hold my beer and watch this_ so he’s not about to find out. 

What does it mean to _take _a bit of it, when it seems like one complete piece? It feels like he’d have to throw it, or grab and pluck as he had before—which absolutely seems like what one would do right before they spontaneously combusted. Hm.

Tentatively, Brian leans in and breathes, the warmth tickling his nose like menthol. Like cinnamon. _I’d like to stay alive please_, he thinks, or maybe says, as he reaches out to stroke his hand down the string. Even that is warming, though concentrated to his imagined-hand. Nice and pleasant, though. 

He wonders—

Brian presses inward so, so gently, then scoops some of the magic into his open palm. It comes away like a small pool of water in his cupped, uh, hands?—don’t think about it, Pat had said. So Brian doesn’t think, but cautiously, as he instinctively splashes the magic against his chest. Imagines that warmth like a lovely bath, like a hot shower after a long dance rehearsal. It’s almost instantaneous, the way it trickles down from Brian’s chest to his torso, stomach, hips, thighs, calves, feet. And then, oh gosh—he’s _hot_, not uncomfortably so, but definitely hotter than before.

The cinnamon bursts on his tongue and Brian snaps his eyes open, uncrosses his legs. “Pat! I’m a roasty toasty boy!”

Pat laughs and slides down off the couch, reaching out for Brian’s hand as though to check his pulse. He presses two fingers to the top of Brian’s wrist, and if Brian hitches a breath, he hopes it’s disguised as like. Magic fatigue. Warmth goosebumps.

“Brian, that’s kick_ass_, dude. You did a magic!”

“I did a magic!” Brian crows, wiggling his hips in an aborted dance. He can’t stop smiling, feels it stretching his cheeks. “I was only a _little_ uncomfortably warm, and now I’m _very_ uncomfortably warm!”

“Yeah summer is uh,” Pat says with a chuckle, “not exactly the best time to practice warming spells. But,” he adds, “extra incentive to learn how to move the warmth away from your body?”

Brian nods, still floating on the high of, _oh heck I did a magic_. “I mean I’d also accept homemade lemonade or some shit, but I guess this will have to do.”

Pat does not have homemade lemonade, but he does have a cold glass of ice water that feels almost painful as it slides down Brian’s esophagus. Just the way he likes it, that first sip when he feels the chilliness slide down into his belly.

“This might be a little more difficult,” Pat says sheepishly, scratching the back of his neck, “since it’s like, removing the heat from your body. But from what I understand a science thing anyway?”

“Way more science in magic than I would have originally guessed, y’know,” Brian says offhand, but he slips his eyes closed, “but huh, cold is just the absence of heat, not its own separate thing.”

“Sure,” Pat says, “absolutely.”

Brian sinks down into that magic space again, getting there a little easier each time he does it, though it’s hard to tell how many minutes pass while he lets himself go. That last time, Pat had shifted to the complete other side of the couch but Brian had only felt like he was inside himself for like five minutes. It’s almost oppressively warm now with the extra heat, but boy howdy is that sure motivation for Brian to learn magic faster.

“You’ll want to push the warmth away from your own body,” Pat says, his voice soft comforting like a blanket. Brian finally gets why people like meditating so much if they can be soft and quiet and soothed by a Pat. “You could try to send the warmth into a specific thing, which is how _much later you would learn how to make a fireball_, but for right now you’re gonna dissipate it into the air. Removing that energy from your body and giving it back to the earth.”

“Crunchy,” Brian says, “but okay.”

“As the kids say, _Big Mood_.”

Brian snickers but breathes out slowly and grasps for his magic again. He doesn’t—it’s probably not right to grab _more_ of his magic, afraid to boost the temperature even higher. So he stretches into his body again for those rivers of heat settled deep into his muscles. 

He tries to draw the heat out first with fingertips like carding wool but that doesn’t do anything at all. He’s still roasty toasty. Brian frowns and furrows his brow. He tries vacuuming the warmth out, _Luigi’s Mansion_ style, but if anything that works even less.

Well shit. 

He’d gotten cocky with his first foray into being a magic boy. Yet another gifted kid unable to cope when something doesn’t go right on the first try.

Brian comes back to the column of his magic and tilts his head. He still doesn’t—okay, maybe thinking about it as _warmth_ or _fire_ isn’t right. It’s just magic. Energy, Pat had said. Brian’s sure there’s some _Hogwarts: A History _type shit that he could read about what magic actually _is_ if there weren’t like fewer than twelve hours to make his ass cash the check that Pat’s mouth wrote. 

If the magic is just supposed to fuel his intention, like asking the ginger to add some pep to his step, maybe this is similar.

He takes a deep breath and gently pushes into the column of his magic, pulls out another soft palmful. _Okay_, he thinks to—himself? His magic? God this is gonna give him a headache. _I’d like to give this back now, thanks for letting me borrow it!_

Brian thinks about the spicy cinnamon on his tongue, the coolness of the mint he’d had in Pat’s tea and the water in his belly; thinks, _alley-oop_, and tosses the handful of magic outward like throwing out a pail of dirty bathwater. 

The warmth that had previously trickled throughout his body does so in reverse, sliding from his extremities back into the core of him, the heart of him, swirling around in the deep-dark space until it tumbles out of his body and splashes out into the surrounding air. Brian shivers as it retreats, cooling each molecule bit by bit until he’s returned to his normal temperature. The air around him grows slightly warmer then cooler again as the warmth fills the entirety of Pat’s apartment.

Brian opens his eyes and blinks heavy once, twice, thrice. He rolls his shoulders. “I’ve never been so happy to be average,” he says, but he’s grinning because _hell yeah, he did another magic._

Pat’s eyes shine like a fuckin’ anime character. “I felt the air as it left, super weird dude. Like when you hit a warm spot in a pool and think _whoopsie doodle, somebody pissed here_.”

“Always piss, with you,” Brian says, sighing. “I promise I didn’t take a leak. That was gen-yoo-wine Brian Warmth, baybee.”

“I know!” Pat says, and he brings his fingers back to circle around Brian’s wrist, feel his pulse. They’re a bit clammy where they press against Brian’s bones, but Pat’s devastatingly thorough in his quasi-medical evaluation.

“Can witches sense other witches doing magic?” Brian asks, his voice quiet in case Pat’s counting heartbeats. But Pat lets go of his wrist anyway. “Like if I warm myself up will your stepdad even notice?”

“Not as a general rule,” Pat says, matching Brian’s tone. He clears his throat, adjusts his glasses. “I don’t think anyone unless they’re _really _powerful has a sixth sense for magic. But I wanted you to know about changing the temperature because it _is _something that other people can feel. You’re borrowing heat from the air or giving some back. And if someone’s close enough, say sitting at the same dinner table as you, they’ll be able to sense it.”

“Like peeing in the pool.”

“Exactly.”

Brian pets Charlie as he walks past, then shoos him away from the yoga mat where he’d started to scratch his claws. Pat entices him into the kitchen with a refilled food bowl, and then they’re back to business. Brian’s ready to get into the Heavy Shit. “Okay, what’s next?”

“Well,” Pat says simply, sitting in his spot on the couch, “doing that approximately a billion more times.”

Brian chokes on his tongue. “_Seriously_? What about, like levitating shit? Or turning water to wine or whatever? Why are we stuck in this Katy Perry song, let’s _go_.”

Pat arches an eyebrow. “Brian, you need to do magic with your _eyes open_ first. Before we can move on to enchanting a broomstick.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, _ah_.”

Brian frowns and scratches at his hairline. He doesn’t want to warm himself up anymore, he could just wear a sweater to dinner like a normal ass person. “Couldn’t I pretend that closing my eyes is part of my character? _What’s my motivation_, ee-tee-cee?”

“Honestly,” Pat says, “they’re really into showmanship, so they’d both probably believe it. But I’d rather not take that chance.”

“Okay, okay, fine. How do I access the force without closing my eyes, Obi-Wan?”

Pat grimaces. “I um. I don’t know?”

“Seriously?” Brian snips. He rubs his free hand over his eyes. “Patrick, you’re my teacher. What the fuck do you _mean_, you don’t know how I’m supposed to do magic? That seems to be, _uh_, a pretty big _gap_.”

“I don’t know, _Brian_,” Pat says, equally snippy as he drapes his arm over the armrest. “All my previous witches knew what they were doing. I didn’t have to _hold their hand _through it.”

That stings, settles in the pit of Brian’s stomach in a way Pat _never _has before. And Pat knows it immediately. His eyes go wide, his mouth drops, parted and nervous. “Brian, I—”

Brian holds up a hand and, _fuck_, closes his eyes, _ugh_. He hates his stupid cry-at-the-drop-of-a-hat response that’s only gotten worse with age. “I don’t want to hear it right now,” he says, his voice deadly calm even to his own ears. “I am going to shove my face in Charles’s belly for sixty seconds because we don’t have time for me to storm out and take a purposeful-yet-clarifying walk around the block. And while I’m doing that, _you_ are going to think about enlightening me even one-sixteenth of a bit as to how I might access my magical center. And _then_ we are going to continue Witch Lessons, because I’m _helping you_, remember? So you gotta help me too.”

“Okay,” Pat says quietly, so soft that Brian barely hears it over the hum of Pat’s AC. “Sorry dude, _fuck_. You’re just trying to help, and I—fuck.”

“It’s been a long day,” Brian says simply, attempting to scooch right on by the uncomfortable moment—whoosh, there it goes. “And we’re both stressed to hell, and I’ve only had one shingle-free day, so I’m gonna pet that tummy in total silence now.”

Brian pets the tummy. It’s a good tummy. Charles only puts up a token protest, meowing in displeasure when Brian huffs out a breath but then purring when Brian pulls back to scritch at his plump kitten cheeks.

Closer to five minutes pass before Brian turns around to the kitchen—fuck studio apartments, seriously, no good place to make a grand exit _or _an entrance—and spots Pat with a hangdog expression and two PB&J sandwiches.

“I get pissy when I’m hangry,” Pat says, hesitant and apologetic without actually being another apology. Bless him. “Lunch?”

“Is it a magical sandwich?” Brian asks, forgiveness without drawn-out forgiveness.

“It’s Jif and some strawberry preserves from the farmer’s market.”

“Oh shit, that sounds magical as fuck.”

\--- 

After lunch, and another cool glass of ice water, Brian resumes his position on the yoga mat.

“I think, uh, actually this might be a better approach,” Pat says, fiddling with the limp ends of his hair. “I mean we still need to practice this a shitload more times, but actually—doing something outside your body might help you, uh, find the magic everywhere, not just inside you.”

“That’s a quote from _Ferngully_, right?” Brian asks. 

Pat breezes on. He sets the empty glass of water on the ground. Well, not quite _empty_. The condensation slowly beads down the side with maybe a quarter-teaspoon of lingering water in the bottom of the cup. He then takes his spot back on the couch, leaning an elbow on the couch arm, propping his head on his hand. “The only other _possible _thing I can- I can _imagine_ coming up tonight is to make liquid either appear or disappear. This all falls under _prestidigitation_, to borrow from D&D again. Heating and cooling, creating water or taking it away, um. _Not _creating sparks, god. If we had another day, _maybe _I could teach you how to light a candle with a flick of your fingers, it’s pretty rad. But.” Pat chuckles and gestures at his chest. “Plants plus flame is a bad combo, don’t take it personally that I don’t want to—hah—play with fire.”

“None taken.”

Pat cracks his neck, one hand twisting his jaw to get a satisfying-sounding pop. “Anyway, the same shit applies to magic focused externally. It’s all just energy transfer: willing your energy into something, or willing its energy into you, or willing some energy in the air, for example, into the water for your glass. People have been doing witchcraft since before people were writing shit down. It’s not always complex spells and arcane circle garbage. 

“I mean, don’t- don’t get me wrong,” Pat adds, gesturing with his free hand. “That stuff helps—and some of the more complex stuff that people have developed over the years needs it, but like. If you’re ever in doubt, just think about the movement of energy.” He pauses, coughs, almost embarrassed for doing a frickin’ monologue. Typical Pat. “Do you have any questions? I know that was kind of a lot.”

“Is the water potable?”

Pat blinks. “What.”

Brian looks down at the glass, still empty. “If I’m pulling the water from the air, which in New York is absolute dog _shit_, does that make the water undrinkable? Like, should I try to grab water from a clean source, or from someone else’s water glass or something?”

Pat blinks again.

“Or do you mean pulling the _literal oxygen molecules _from the air? Because if that’s the case, where do I get the hydrogen from, huh? S’there just some spare hydrogen hanging about like, _‘scuse me, sir, could I have some H if you please_? And then what happens to all the other gunk in the air, the carbon and pollution and shit, does that fall to the table and, like, get all in my steak?”

The silence hangs in the air for several moments before Pat smiles wanly and says, “I don’t know, Brian, you’re the fucking scientist.”

Brian could take that as another jab, walk out the door and leave Pat to his own devices for dealing with his stepdad. But he won’t do that, because he _likes _Pat, damn him. Maybe even like-likes him, if Pat would give him a chance. So he huffs, instead, sasses the correct amount to remain friends with someone. “Okay, Pat Gill, I’ll just handwave away the science, Mr. _It’s like Physics, Brian!_”

“Dude, you just gotta get the water in the cup,” Pat says, leaning down to shake Brian’s shoulder. In a friendly, non-grumpy way. “There’s probably some theory about why you should or shouldn’t do it some way or another, but we don’t have the fucking time.”

“Can’t wait to dig into that later,” Brian says. “As long as your stepdad doesn’t murder me for witch crimes.”

“He’s an honorable witch, so he’d at least duel you first,” Pat says, which wow. Absolutely does _not_ assuage Brian’s fears in the slightest. But rather than interrogate that fucking line of questioning, Brian stares at the glass in front of him again.

He tries to imagine it as a full glass of water, doesn’t even make a _glass half full_ joke. But there’s no way it’ll be that easy, and—yep. Nothing happens. The cup remains not even half-empty, but totally empty. Sometimes you have to turn the computer off and then back on again to figure out there’s something else going on. And sometimes, squinting at the glass while imagining it as full does not, in fact, add water to the glass.

“I know we’re trying to work on eyes open,” Pat says, “but also you gotta not look like you’re taking a _gnarly_ shit.”

Brian rubs at the bridge of his nose and sighs. “Okay, yeah. No sleeping, no shitting, easy as pie, Pat Gill.”

Pat snorts, Brian snorts back before returning to the fucking cup. This whole _magic _thing isn’t like science at all, it’s like one of those lateral thinking puzzles that the Gilbert brood used to do on long road trips. Patrick and Laura and Brian all elbowing each other in the backseat when they thought up increasingly wrong and wronger answers. Like _a man is found dead in a room with just a puddle and a rope, how did he die?; well clearly he hired a salmon swimming upstream to pull the rope until he choked; no, stupid, the room was a pool but the world got turned upside down and he was one of those people who had gills not lungs, so he died_. Brian sucked at those. And now he has to do magic with them.

He takes a deep breath, tries to get into that sinky-meditatey headspace without actually sinking _or_ meditating. He’s gotta figure out how the man died in an empty room, and by that, he means how to get some goddamn water in the goddamn glass.

Brian imagines his column of magic pulsing up the center of him, like his spinal cord, warm and bright and—and magical, duh. It’s all flippin’ magic. When he’s reaching into that wellspring, he’s not _actually _reaching—or at least, it doesn’t seem like he’s doing anything in the meat space, gesticulating and shit. So Brian starts there. Staring at the cup, feeling the energy from his magical center, the hum of that orange liquid he’d splashed onto his chest and then cast out into the world. 

He can see the condensation, and he knows the smooth press of the glass against his finger, the warmer slide of droplets of water. He’s run his fingers along a foggy windowpane, rubbed off his glasses after entering a warm practice room, served someone a room temperature drink at a party and gotten grumbled at. So he imagines the water under his fingertips, what would happen if he used his magic as a little scoop and just scoop-a-scooped it back up the glass, tipped it over the edge until it fell back inside to join the rest of its friends.

Pat sucks a sharp breath but Brian doesn’t break his focus, because _holy shit_, holy shit holy shit. He feels the droplets bending to his will, moving with the push and pull he exerts. And yes water would _bend to his will _if he just plunged his hand into it, but he’s _not _plunging his hand into it, he’s sitting five feet away and water is traveling up the glass and back into the cup, holy motherfucking shit. 

It’s—well, it’s not _easy _from that point to feel the microscopic water dangling in the air around him, but Brian knows what he’s looking for, the insistent trickle of water on his skin: foggy Scotland mornings hanging heavy and persistent on his way to rehearsal; humid Baltimore afternoons on the campus lawn; evenings at his mom’s place in South Carolina, the beach wind thick with salt and water and the tang of life. That he pulls like taffy into the cup, using his magic like a funnel—a swirling bit of orange that makes water move where he desires: not spilling over the sides, or shooting up like a fountain, but. Pouring gently, guided, purposeful into the waiting mouth of the cup.

When the glass is nearly full again and Brian feels a shift in the humidity around his body, he exhales and closes his eyes, finally, and the room seems to exhale-inhale along with him as the air moves and reconfigures.

“Brian!”

Brian takes another breath, opens his eyes, and Pat crowds into Brian’s space like he’s about to bowl him over with his giant, gangly limbs. “Brian, _fuck_, dude you—holy _shit_.” Pat gathers Brian into a hug, and they’re both sitting-crouching on the floor so it’s awkward as hell, but he’s _squeezed _against Pat’s ribs as Pat crushes them together. “This is gonna work, god, I’m—that’s—you did it!”

“I did it!” Brian agrees, just as incredulous as Pat, because—he did it! The glass is full and before it was empty, and now Brian’s done three whole magics and really, how many magics could one be expected to do at dinner, anyway? “Pat—Patrick! You taught me a magic!”

“Thank fucking Christ,” Pat says, but it’s muffled into Brian’s hair. He fumbles behind himself for the water glass, nearly tips it over, but instead grabs it by the lip and brings it around to Brian’s chest. “You should _take a fucking sip, babe_,” he says, and he’s laughing, and Brian’s so fond-exasperated he could cry—but even if he _does _cry, he could, like, suck the tears back into his eyeballs or some other wild shit. So Brian treats Pat like the wonderful coach he is, after winning the Big Game—

And dumps the glass of water over Pat’s head.

\---

After Pat whimpers at the cold water and pretends to sulk, after Brian fetches him a kitchen towel to get the worst of it out of his hair, after Brian practices his three very good magics over and over again until they are _most excellent_ magics, the sun vanishes behind the skyline and it’s time to head to dinner. But before dinner, Pat’s trying to convince Brian that he should wear a cloak.

“I am not walking out of the apartment dressed like Howl’s Moving Castle.”

“Brian,” Pat says, holding a musty black cloak that he’d found in a box under the bed that was full of empty photo frames and dog-eared books. “_Please_? He’ll think you’re a nice boy, very traditional, a good witch for me to attach myself to.”

Brian sighs and rubs his eyes. He’d successfully talked Pat out of the eyeliner (_“bad gender feels, bucko”_) and had whole-ass agreed to the sparkly nail polish because hell yeah. But the cloak is. A lot. “Now who’s the rotisserie shithead,” he grumbles, to which Pat replies, _eh, you’re like half-baked at most_.

Brian wishes he was half-baked. That might make the experience tolerable. But alas. Pat pouts, and says, “Seriously, Brian, for me? I won’t take any photos, and I _promise _it’ll be helpful, and you can take it off the second we’re back in the cab and out of sight.”

Pat blinks those big eyes. Brian’s a goner. _For Pat?_ Of course. He fastens the cloak around his neck with a silver bird brooch, and asks, “Do you have a tiny ponytail for my hair? I think that’ll hit the vibe we want.”

Pat opens his mouth into a wide smile. Brian is _such _a goner.

The Lyft driver drops them off a few blocks from the restaurant so Pat can answer any last-minute questions as they leisurely stroll down the sidewalk. The one good thing about New York is that only two people notice Brian’s absolutely bonkers outfit: a cloak over a polo shirt and linen pants and boat shoes. So Brian calls that a win.

“Is there anything I should know before going in?” Brian says, fiddling with the brooch. “I feel like you caught me up on the magic shit, but I don’t know anything about your stepdad.”

“He knows I don’t talk about him that often,” Pat says, shrugging, keeping up his brisk, long-legged pace. “I think you’ll be okay if you do, y’know, one of your cute little laughs and say, _oh you know Patrick, he’s strong and charming and funny and humble, but he barely talks about himself!_”

“Hm.”

“My stepdad fucking loves telling stories so—oh, actually that’s a good idea, just keep ‘im talking,” Pat says, tapping Brian on the shoulder. “Then he won’t notice you’re not doing magic left and right.”

“Is _he_ gonna be doing magic left and right?” Brian asks, picking at an invisible dust speck on his _cloak, Christ_, as he walks. “I thought you said witches don’t do that.”

“I’m hoping that he won’t,” Pat says, cryptic as ever. “But you never know with h—ah, shit.”

Brian’s about to ask _what’s wrong_, but he barely gets the first syllable out of his mouth before Pat yanks Brian into an alley by the arm. There’s a bright flash and a whizzing noise, and—some flower petals falling from the sky as a nasty roll of fog creeps along the pavement.

Brian’s question quickly becomes, _what the fuck_? But it’s answered immediately when two men materialize out of thin fucking air and swoosh into the alley, cloaks billowing around them in an artificial wind.

“So glad you could make it,” Pat says dryly. “Hope the trip wasn’t too bad.”

“Hell-_llo_, Patrick!” the man on the left says, sweeping forward, his cloak taking on a life of its own. “It wasn’t too bad, but you know how it is when you’re traveling through the Realms of _Magick_.” He pauses, and Brian thinks for a wild second that he’s maybe waiting for applause. “Ahh, and this must be _Brian_. I recognize him from the little show you two do together.”

Brian coughs and steps forward, hand outstretched like a full southern gentleman even when meeting two subjects of a _Buzzfeed Unsolved _video. 

“Hi, yes it’s so. Lovely? To meet both of you,” he says, coughing on _lovely _when the man steps into the light and Brian gets his first glimpse of some truly godawful makeup. Pat had been right—Brian’s never seen this much black eyeliner outside of that video of goth kids dancing under an overpass. “I’m uh. I’m Brian.”

“Hell-_llo_, Brian,” says the other man, who is—good god, somehow wearing even more eyeliner, what the fuck.

“Yes, hell-_llo_ Brian!” the first man says, holding out his hand for a shake. It’s _so_ clammy.

“Brian,” Pat mumbles, quickly moving to Brian’s side and bumping against his shoulder. “This is my stepdad and his familiar.”

“Now Patrick, I know we need _no_ introduction,” the second man says breezily, “but that was lackluster at best.” 

Pat clenches his jaw and Brian squeezes Pat’s hand hard and purposeful, the universal symbol for _not now, dear_. “Yes, Patrick,” Brian says, so cheerful, all bright smiles. “You should—”

“I’m Crystal Thymothy,” the first man says. 

There’s another flash, and the man—_Crystal Thymothy_—begins pulling a rope of rainbow scarves out of his mouth, one after the other in a sickening display. They pile higher and higher on the ground until the last one pops free—and there’s a _dove _tied to the end of the last one, an _angry_ dove, but it’s not angry for very long because it bursts into flames and then turns into a bouquet of flowers.

“I’m Patrick’s stepdad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _**Pat, as Crystal Thymothy:** In the wizarding world, we have a word for people like you.  
**Brian:** Oh yeah, what is it?  
**Pat:** ….Mug….Muggless.  
**Brian:** Ohhkay.  
**Pat:** Which is different from the thing in Harry Potter because—  
**Brian:** That’s a not true story.  
**Pat:** —because ours is real._  
—Gill and Gilbert, episode 14


	5. Part 3 - 1/2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Pat, as Crystal Thymothy**: Magic is a mysterious thing, Brian.  
**Brian**: I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m not a magician.  
—Gill and Gilbert, episode 14

Brian blinks so hard it feels like he dislodges a contact lens even though he’s wearing his glasses. “Right—yes,” Brian says. “Of course. It’s so lovely to meet you Crystal, um. Thymothy.” He turns to the other man, “So you must be—”

“Crystal Robin,” that man says, extending his hand in a flourish. The movement causes some hair to slip out of his little half-ponytail.

“Y-yes, obviously,” Brian says. “So you’re both—”

“Crystal, yes!”  
“Crystal, yes!”

“Ah.”

Brian’s face must be doing something buck-fuckin’-wild, because Pat swoops in to stand in front of Brian like a human shield. Or a plant shield?

Brian’s losing it.

“You must be starving from your trip,” Pat says, gesturing toward the mouth of the alley with his shoulder. He takes the bouquet of flowers and sets it on top of a trash can. “Shall we?”

“We shall, Patrick!” one of the Crystals says. They exude the same terrible energy, and while Brian knows that they’re not related to Pat by blood, they definitely all go together. Visually speaking. 

They stride—well, the Crystals _stride_, Pat and Brian just walk—out of the alley and hang a left on 42nd. “So, I—_we_—are thrilled y’all are visiting,” Brian says. He pulls his cape out from between his legs while he walks, like a dog that steps over its own leash. How does anyone move in these damn things. “Thanks for making such a long trip.”

Crystal—Thymothy, it looks like from the back—turns over his shoulder. “Why, it was no trouble at all, Brian!” he says. “When you’re a master of the arcane arts, traveling through the Realms of Magick is but a breeze. 

“Of course,” Brian says, clearing his throat. _You gotta yes-and this, bucko_. “It’s just, well you two must be so busy with all of your, um, important magicks? It’s so kind of you to put those on hold for the evening.”

Crystal Thymothy hums, delighted. “Well, when you put it that way,” he says. “But we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit when Pat invited us, even on such short notice.”

Pat makes a choked sound and Brian slaps at Pat’s upper arm to shut him up. “A mosquito,” Brian lies, then adds, more grandiose, “Don’t worry, I have slain it!”

“My hero,” Pat says dryly, but he rubs Brian’s shoulder in silent _thank you_. Lord alive.

They walk only a block or two before Brian glances around at the buildings and realizes they’re—huh, they’re passing Madame Tussaud’s? He hasn’t been down this way since they shot that bonus footage of Brian piggybacking Pat. In all the evening’s hub-bub, Brian hadn’t thought to ask where they were going, and Pat had called the Lyft when they’d missed the train because Brian’s cape got caught on a weird piece of metal at the bus stop. Brian does a quick spin to orient himself in Times Square, and—

“Oh,” Brian says, staring up at the giant red sign. He leans in toward Pat to whisper, “Not the Olive Garden?” But Crystal Thymothy must hear, because he does a large, sweeping gesture toward the front door, smiling a too-wide smile back at Brian.

“Of course not,” Crystal Thymothy says grandly. “Why, this restaurant imports biscuits from the Cheddar Bay, and they’re _quite _remarkable.”

——

The waitress, Joy, seats them on the opposite side of the restaurant from the live lobster tank, which is truly the nicest thing she could have done for Brian. He’s not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination but he’s still a bit iffy on watching someone pick a lobster out of the tank like a fucked-up gashapon machine. They climb into the booth, Brian and Pat on one side and the Crystals on the other. It’s a pretty tight squeeze, though. A booth made for four doesn’t account for full-length cloaks.

Crystal Thymothy props his menu open in front of himself. “Oh goodness, it’s Shrimp Fest,” he says, delighted. His rings jangle together when he claps his fingertips. “A whole festival just for shrimp.”

“Ooh, you _do _love shrimp,” Crystal Robin says. His own menu rests on the table, his hands clasped on top of it.

“What are your thoughts on shrimp?” Brian asks Pat, thumbing through the specials menu.

“They got a poop vein,” Pat says.

Joy, bless her, brings their drinks in record time along with a basket of cheddar bay biscuits. Crystal Thymothy selects each one personally for everyone based on the energy in the garlic and how it resonates with their aura. It’s definitely a ruse so he can touch every biscuit to find one with the perfect texture and cheese ratio, but what’s Brian going to do, call Crystal Thymothy out on it? He’d get _crucio_’d in a second. And with the way Crystal Robin is eyeing the fifth biscuit—the one that Joy put in the basket to tear their family apart—Brian doubts he can get his mitts on that one either. 

He starts to take a bite but Pat elbows Brian hard enough that it startles him into nearly dropping it onto the plate. A, _hey what the fuck my dude,_ is on the top of his tongue, but then Pat’s eyes catch his and pointedly flick over to the Crystals. When Brian glances over, the two men are making delighted little sounds about their—ah. Their piping hot biscuits. 

Brian’s is lukewarm at best. Pat’s too. 

Brian’s stomach sinks into his butt. Time to magic, then.

Here he goes. Just gotta. 

Magic, right.

Pat leans over, ostensibly to grab a straw for his water, but it’s all a clever ruse so he can bump Brian’s shoulder. Brian reads a lot into that bump. Like, _you got this,_ and _show ‘em your stuff, _and _that cape brings out the color of your eyes_. 

Brian exhales and cups his biscuit in his palms, reaches out for the trickle of warmth he finds in the bread, the slightest _something _he can grab onto. It feels muffled, like it’s being played from tinny speakers a room over. A lot harder with a solid instead of a liquid perhaps. But Brian assumes the principles are the same. Warm it up, don’t make it explode. 

Brian gently nudges more heat around his hands—soft, at first, then a crescendo of warmth that rises from his palm into the biscuit. It’s harder to feel anything change, nothing bubbles or burbles or evaporates, the biscuit solid as ever in his grasp. But then there’s—oh, there’s a wisp of steam, the world’s tiniest puff that curls up and into the fluorescent lights. And then another, and another, until there are some heat waves radiating off the thing. Hell. Fucking. Yes.

Once he’s deposited his biscuit onto the crab-printed side plate, Brian rolls his shoulders and pitches his voice a bit louder. “Oh, Patrick, let me get that for you,” he says, daintily stroking his finger over the crevices of the biscuit. He’s smirking in a way that maybe gives the whole game away but whatever, he did it with a quick touch and not a full-on, two-handed grab. The warmth had felt closer to his fingers, swirling around that place inside him, ready at his control. Way cooler than a fireball, The Con is On.

That thought’s only in his brain for about point-oh-two seconds before Crystal Robin leans forward on his elbow and flips a luscious strand of hair out of his face. “So _Brian_,” Crystal Robin says, elongating his name into three syllables. “Pat says you were a, hmm, _latecomer _to magic. No long, magical line stretching back centuries, I take it.”

_Crystal Robin is a bit of a prick_, Pat had told Brian on their walk from the Lyft. _He’s descended from Joan of Arc’s familiar and he won’t fucking shut up about it_.

“No, I uh, started magic in college,” Brian says. “You know how it is at that age. You try out a bunch of different stuff and, well—if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, something’s gotta stick.” Brian laughs and takes a nervous sip of water. “I even thought about majoring in neuroscience, if you can believe that—”  
  
“I can’t believe it!”

“—until I discovered my latent connection to the Realms of Magick. It’s been a core part of my life ever since.”

Crystal Thymothy nods thoughtfully, steepling his fingers under his chin. “Fascinating, fascinating. And you’re not worried about—well, I know some people, when they are away from home for the first time, they _experiment _with the arcane arts. Spaghetti, like you said.”

“Witches until graduation,” Crystal Robin agrees, frowning as though the thought gives him stomach pains. “Then they pretend like they never communed with the Realms of Magick in the first place.” 

“Tragic,” Crystal Thymothy says, folding up his menu. “Simply tragic. I heard on the news it’s because of—”

"I _love_ being a witch,” Brian interrupts quickly. He has no idea what the fuck the end of _that _sentence was going to be, but he’s one-hundo percent positive it was going to be offensive to _somebody_. “Especially after meeting Pat. It’s been marvelous to work with him—” which isn’t a lie, per se, just stretching the truth like saltwater taffy, “—and I’ve never doubted my powers. They’re a part of me as much as breathing.”

“Brilliantly said!” Crystal Thymothy grins. 

Brian chugs like half of his water and smiles. Time to divert attention from himself for a second so he can anxiously tear his biscuit to shreds on the table. “So um, I don’t know that Pat’s ever told me how you got into—_ow!_—into magic.” 

Pat had grabbed the meat of Brian’s thigh and dug his nails in, presumably to stop Brian before he finished that sentence, but it was too late. Crystal Thymothy’s eyes sparkle and he leans down onto both of his elbows, getting his hands way too far into Brian’s personal space.

“I was _born_ into magic, Brian,” Crystal Thymothy says, his voice morphing into a strange timbre. “My father was struck by a magic truck at the moment of my conception.”

Brian comes within _milliseconds _of doing a spit-take, but he swallows it down and wipes his mouth with one of the cloth napkins. “I—huh,” he says. And he waits. And there’s no explanation for what feels like an _excruciating _amount of time. “Uh, what does a magic truck . . . port?”

Crystal Robin laughs, not unkindly but also not- not unkindly. “Oh no no no,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “It was a truck _driven _by a magician.”

“So it’s kinda like whoever fills the vessel makes the truck what it is.” That’s complete garbo nonsense but Brian feels like his brain’s inside-out.

“Mm, yes,” Crystal Thymothy agrees. He shifts his weight, bouncing and winding like a cartoon snake. “That’s how wizard conception works. My father was making love on my mother and a truck shot through the living room window, off of a ramp, and just clipped him _clean_ off of her—” 

“Oh my god,” Pat mumbles. He starts shredding his straw wrapper. 

“—And the magical energies transferred to me at the moment of his death.”

There’s silence for a couple moments before Brian realizes that was the _end _of the story. “Well that’s,” he flounders, “less beautiful, but it’s certainly a story. Um. Bring it up every Mother’s Day?”

“And now the magician is my father!” Crystal Thymothy proclaims, just as Joy walks over to take their food orders. 

Pat’s hand lands on Brian’s thigh under the table, warm and comforting and squeezing in _what the fuck _solidarity. In another context, the touch would make him gasp, keep him up at night like a Victorian protagonist with the vapors, but in the Times Square Red Lobster it’s soothing, calming. 

Ah, probably some magical assistance from Pat, then. A mandragora xanny. Rad.

Brian orders the chicken alfredo before he processes that this isn’t a good place to get chicken _or _alfredo. But Joy says, “Great choice!” and leaves to put their order in. When Brian glances back to the table, Crystal Robin’s staring at Pat, a calculating frown on his face that Brian does not like.

“You’re still not looking very well, Patrick,” Crystal Robin says. He twirls his straw around in his drink and leans toward Crystal Thymothy. “Doesn’t he still? His color’s all wrong.”

Pat folds his hands on top of the table and sits up straight, holds his head high like he’ll be punished by a schoolmarm if he doesn’t. “I’m doing much better,” Pat says, turning to Brian with a lovely smile. “Brian’s a very capable witch.”

A small, pleased noise bubbles out of Brian’s throat before he consciously tells it to. “_Patrick_,” Brian gushes. “That’s very sweet, but don’t sell yourself short! You’ve been, uh, instrumental in my magic quest. Increased my abilities by one-hundred percent, I bet.”

“Well shucks,” Pat says in a bad southern accent, but he’s got a bit of pink on his cheeks all the same.

—-

Brian hates to admit it, but between the bouts of soul-crushing terror that the Crystals will drag Pat back to Maine kicking and screaming, he’s actually having a good time. The improv’s scratching that good good community theater itch. Brian _loves _a mind game, doubling down that he’s got a brilliant hand when he’s really a couple spades shy of anything useful. He’s Puck pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. He’s the Cheshire Cat, grinning and dangling his prey from a tall branch. He’s—

He’s wet.

No, not wet. _Soaked_. Like he’d stepped out of a building and into a downpour, his shirt sticking to his chest, his cloak dripping water onto the seat and then pooling onto the seat below his ass, creating a sensory nightmare. 

Brian sputters, flicking some water off his fingers back onto the table. It’s not—it’s not hard to figure out what happened: Crystal Robin’s hands are extended with a flourish, some David Blaine shit over Brian’s empty water glass. But Brian can’t _believe it_. Because _what_.

Crystal Robin breaks out into bright peals of laughter. Crystal Thymothy’s laugh is more subdued, a haunting little giggle, but no less obvious. He claps, delighted. “Marvelous!” he says. “Oh, he got you good! I_ do so_ love a witch’s trick.”

Pat’s knuckles are white where they grip against the table. He’s a shade of furious that Brian’s never seen before, the vein in his jaw visible with his teeth clenched. Pat’s been on edge all night, but that might have been the proverbial last straw.

Brian cuts him off at the pass, fakes a laugh that would have gotten him an _A_ in his improv class in Scotland. “A very good trick!” he agrees, though the water starts to soak through to his skin. He’d better do something about that soon. “Cold, too.”

Brian closes his eyes for a moment to get his head on the right way, then opens them as he draws the droplets of water off his skin. There’s—well, there’s a lot of them, especially when Brian starts pulling the water out of his shirt and cloak. And maybe it takes a bit longer than a seasoned witch would take, but Brian gets the water into a small sphere in his hands, lumpy and not perfectly round—but still absolutely magic.

Before Brian can do something brash like chuck it right back at Crystal Robin, he lets the water funnel down through his hands into his glass.

Crystal Thymothy says something about Brian being a good sport, but Brian doesn’t process every individual word as he takes a sip of the water that was _just all over his chest_. Pat rubs Brian’s thigh again, and Brian squeezes back over his knuckles. He has a feeling Pat will have endless apologies after this, probably beg Brian to let Pat make it up to him somehow. Brian won’t take it, because he is a good sport, but maybe when enough time has passed he can pull those words out of the bank, think about just how nicely Pat could make it up to him.

He coughs and wipes his mouth with a napkin.

“Dear Brian, what were you saying about Pat’s magic?” Crystal Thymothy asks, grinning, seemingly oblivious to how Pat’s about to blow a gasket. 

“Oh,” Brian says, smiling as he rubs his thumb around the rim of his glass, “just that Pat’s been wonderful in furthering my, uh, magic development. Yesterday, he taught me how he gets his anti-anxiety tinctures so crisp. They’ve been a real lifesaver at work.”

Crystal Robin scoffs as he takes a sip of his Dr. Pepper. Brian bristles, already hating the sound. “Oh, you’re still doing _tinctures_, huh?” Crystal Robin says haughtily. “We’re all about smudging now. I just find that tinctures aren’t as _powerful_ or _effective _as my other magicks, but well, we all do what we can, I suppose.”

Brian clenches his fingers into Pat’s thigh with enough force to keep him seated, should Pat attempt to dramatically stand up in the middle of the restaurant. But Pat doesn’t move—he just smiles a weird, shark-like and eerie smile that Brian’s never seen before, but which instantly makes him uneasy.

“Fascinating,” Pat returns, his voice dripping with disdain. “I mean, personally I’m not comfortable appropriating Native American and First Nations culture like some Western Europeans do, but as you said, we all do what we can.”

Brian’s jaw drops open and he doesn’t even try to stop it. God Bless Comrade Pat.

Crystal Thymothy startles and lays his hands flat on the table. “Now Patrick—” 

“Not to mention—”

Crystal Robin jerks one finger to his lips in a shushing motion and though it’s not audible both Pat and Crystal Thymothy do in fact shush. Brian takes about thirty nervous sips of his water.

“Now Crystal,” Crystal Robin says placatingly, the smarmy jerk, “we can’t expect Patrick to understand our connection to the Realms of Magick when he lives down here in this—” he sniffs, “—this, well this place, utterly _devoid _of respect for tradition. He’ll come around when he’s older, you know,” Crystal Robin adds, patting Crystal Thymothy’s arm. “More advanced in his magical practice.” 

Pat inhales deeply through his nose in a way that looks physically painful, but Brian’s impressed he manages to keep a smile on his face the whole time. It’s a spooky, shark-like smile, sure, but it's definitely a smile.

“So how’s mom?” Pat asks.

If the Crystals are surprised by the sudden topic change, they don’t show it. Crystal Thymothy beams as he gesticulates, his many rings glinting off the fluorescent lights. Almost blindingly so. “She’s fantastic, Patrick!” Crystal Thymothy says. “Tending the summer garden with your grandma as we speak.” He nods toward Brian, adding, “You’ll have to come up in September when the blueberries ripen, Brian—_ooh _they’re marvelous!”

“That does sound marvelous,” Brian agrees. It’s easy to imagine it: walking along a dirt path with Pat, picking handfuls of blueberries and shoving them straight into their mouths still warm from the brush. Both of their fingers and mouths purple and sticky-sweet, maybe a lightning bug or two in the air for good measure. Some late evening birdsong obscured by the whizzes and bangs of Crystal Thymothy communing with the Realms of Magick in the shed.

It crashes down, then. Brian doesn’t get blueberries in Maine. He’s not _that _method, and anyway, Pat will have found a new witch by September. He’ll bring them to the Gill family compound and point out all his favorite boyhood spots. They’ll share weird dinners with the Crystals and hopefully less-weird dinners with Pat’s mom, eat lobster or whatever because Brian’s not sure what all people get up to in Maine, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t _have _to think about it because he won’t be planning the itinerary or booking the Airbnb.

Brian’s heart may be stitched to his sleeve, but he’s a master of putting on a coat to keep away the chill. Or something.

“I was curious, Crystal Thymothy,” he asks, his voice wobble-free and steady. “I don’t know if Pat’s ever talked about your, uh. Family situation? With, you know, being married to Pat’s mom but with Crystal Robin as your familiar.” 

“It’s simple, Brian,” Crystal Thymothy says, rubbing his chin. “Pat’s mother and I copulate quite frequently—”

“_Oh my god_.”

“—but Crystal Robin and I share a special bond as witch and familiar that’s separate from my marriage. I mean, we too copulate—”

“_I’m actively dying_.”

“—but it’s, hm.” Crystal Thymothy pauses, looking lost in thought. “Well, Pat’s mother is still the familiar for Pat’s father. It’s all quite amicable as far as the Realms of Magick are concerned. It’s sort of like your muggle movie _The Holiday_.”

“It’s sort of like your muggle movie _Bridget Jones’s Diary_,” Crystal Robin adds.

Crystal Thymothy nods. “It’s sort of like your muggle movie _My Best Friend’s Wedding_.”

“Ah, yes,” Crystal Robin says. “You know, your muggle movies are quite good!”

Brian nods, but his head’s a lead balloon. Heavy, sinking, lead, trapped in his fucking cloak. Pat leans against his shoulder again, effectively slides him some Calm Brian The Fuck Down juice, which damn—Brian’s really gotta bottle some of Pat’s _essence _or whatever if it can stop him mid-panic in two seconds flat. 

He coughs and scratches at the back of his neck. The cloak is so _fucking _itchy, anxiety or no. “Yes, I—I grew up watching many m-_muggle _movies,” he says. “My parents were non-magical folk, hence the, you know. Starting-in-college thing.”

Crystal Robin hums. “It all makes sense now,” he says, fiddling with his ponytail. 

Brian hates to ask, but—“What, um. What makes sense?”

Crystal Robin sniffs. “I mean, just your complete disregard for the bond between witches and their mandragora.”

Goddammit, if he starts crying here—

“Are you fucking serious?” Pat asks, measured and too-polite.

“_Patrick_,” Crystal Thymothy starts, but Crystal Robin shushes him again.

“It’s true, Patrick,” Crystal Robin says, gesturing loosely in their general direction. Some biscuit crumbs shake loose from his fingers. “You’re almost as bad as you were during your show.” 

He turns to Brian and frowns, clasping his hands together. “Nothing personal, my dear,” he says, “but if you were treating him better, he’d be able to sustain this form with ease.”

It sure as shit _feels _personal, but Brian plasters on his smile and keeps his head ducked down.

“I appreciate your concern,” Pat says, voice low, “but Brian and I are doing what works best for us. And while- while that may not be how you and Crystal Thymothy do things, it’s none of your business.”

The table falls silent, punctuated only with a pointed straw-slurp from Pat and some light munching from Crystal Thymothy. Brian feels like he’s about to vibrate out of his skin. His chest’s too tight and he needs to burst out of it like that thing from _Alien_. 

Ah yes, anxiety time. 

“‘Scuse me,” he says, sliding out of the booth, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Gotta use the little witch’s room.” 

It’s a short, quick, and purposeful walk to the back of the restaurant, past where a harried water is inputting an order for a table of twelve. Brian slips into the restroom’s available stall, thankful there’s an actual lid to this toilet seat so he can collapse dramatically onto it. His knee bangs against the toilet paper holder and there’s a mysterious puddle on the floor, but Brian folds his head into his hands and rests his elbows on his thighs.

_Fuck_.

Hopefully Pat isn’t mad at him for being a fucking miserable coward, running when the going gets tough to _cry in the Red Lobster bathroom_. Brian’s sure Pat wouldn’t be mad about something like that, would say something about it being healthy for Brian to be in touch with his emotions. It almost makes Brian feel _worse_, that Pat would be so kind about it.

Brian digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and exhales shakily. “It’s not always about you, ” Brian whispers, with a hope and a prayer that no one’s at the urinal. 

But it is, sort of, isn’t it? Brian sees Pat every fucking day of the work week, sometimes more when they’re banging out a script or learning about witchcraft. Brian should have noticed Pat looking worse and worse over the last few weeks. Even the last few days. He couldn’t have asked what was wrong? Like a friend who wasn’t wholly consumed by his own shit, by his own narrative barreling through the universe like an out-of-control asteroid? 

“I had shingles, it wasn’t my fault,” Brian whispers, rubbing at his eyes. “And I’m helping now.”

_Are you_? his traitor anxiety voice needles, digging into his softest places. _Or are you making it worse for both of you?_

Three or four big, stupid tears slide down Brian’s cheek, and he sniffs, wipes them away with his knuckles. Fuck his stupid brain, he _is_ helping. What does it know, anyway, it’s got imposter syndrome out the wazoo. Maybe Pat’s got a good spell he can pass along for when Brian needs to tell his anxiety disorder, _hey, could you just not??? _because he’s in the middle of something else.

But for Pat to teach him that, Brian’s got to get back to the table and finish out the weirdest dinner he’s ever had at a chain restaurant. Which is saying something, because he came out to his parents as trans at an Outback Steakhouse.

Brian grabs a wad of toilet paper and dabs it under his eyes and across his cheeks. Then he takes a big breath, tosses the paper into the toilet, and strides out of the bathroom like he’s confident and doesn’t cry in public. Fake it ‘til you make it. 

Tensions seem to have deescalated at the table if only because the food has arrived. Pat’s practically shoving his into his mouth as Brian slides into the booth. “Smells delicious,” Brian comments, even his chicken alfredo, which like. What.

“Yes, it’s remarkable,” Crystal Thymothy says, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “They have a feast fit for an admiral here, and we can just order it!”

“Right,” Brian says, twirling some pasta around on his fork. He exhales and looks for an opening for a conversation starter, though it’s hard getting a word in edgewise around the Crystals. But Brian’s typically good at meet-the-parents small talk. They didn’t call him Boy-next Door Gilbert for nothing. “So, Crystal—”

“Yes?”  
“Yes?”

“Crystal Thymothy,” Brian amends, strained. Lord have mercy. “Patrick told me yesterday about y’alls latest project in passing, but I’d love to know more about it.” 

Pat had mentioned no such thing.

“Why, but of course!” Crystal Thymothy says, spearing a bite of broccoli on the end of his fork. “You see, when you’ve been in the arcane arts as long as I have, you start to wonder—is there something we’re missing? Can there be something _beyond _the Realms of Magick? Why, as far back as—”

Brian drains the last of his water and nods where appropriate, though most everything’s going over his head. He thinks that has little to do with his magical inabilities and more to do with the fact that Crystal Thymothy is bad at talking in a general sense. Lots of half-formed sentences with no resolution, like Pat dialed up to a hundred.

Plus, it’s hard to pay attention with Crystal Robin staring at Brian, sucking cocktail sauce off a shrimp like deboning a chicken wing. Brian winces, half expecting another lapful of water, but after three shrimps it still doesn’t come—not in his lap, or even in his shoes under the table. 

It’s eerily like Crystal Robin’s waiting to catch Brian slippin’, but Brian doesn’t know what he could do to not, uh, slip. He’s already done the thing with the biscuits, and he’s wearing a cloak in Times Square, and he’s listening intently to Crystal Thymothy’s spiel about other planes of existence. He’s not sure what Crystal Robin _wants_, how he can control the narrative and help Pat and throw two witches off his back.

Brian glances around the table looking for something that would be impressive given his skillset of two skills. Well, he doesn’t want to sell himself short. He has many skills, but he doesn’t think the Crystals would appreciate his non-magical ones, or even know what Premiere is. Gotta close the deal, Gilbert. There aren’t any more biscuits for him to warm, no glasses to refill unless he drains his current glass and even then, Crystal Robin hadn’t seemed that impressed. 

A rock drops in Brian’s stomach when Pat clears his throat and coughs, and Crystal Thymothy pauses in his story for the briefest moment, considering, calculating. 

Pat can’t lose Brian, but Brian can’t lose Pat, either.

And when Crystal Robin claps his hands and adds, “Oh yes, why we were just discussing how my powers might be beneficial to the research! You see, my ancestors—” Brian takes advantage of Crystal Robin’s distraction. 

Brian just goes for it, thinks, _hey earth, I promise I will plant a tree, like, tomorrow if you don’t make me a crispy lil tender. _He pulls some warmth from a pocket of air near his rapidly-warming toes, but the prickling sensation helps him dig deeper, plant his feet and search for every thrumming note of energy curling beneath the floorboards. He feels very _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ up in this joint, especially when the heat starts to rise uncomfortably into his feet, his legs, until Brian’s skin is hotter than he would strictly prefer. 

_Come on_, he thinks, gritting his teeth. The sticky humidity leaves Brian with sweat beading under his pants, across his belly and waist, his skin starting to _hurt _with how warm it is. He rests his palm on Pat’s thigh for leverage, for _something_. Pat startles but places his hand over Brian’s, that fuzzy magical kind of warm seeping from his body—

and that gives Brian the push he needs. He breathes out, just one quick exhale, and the heat flows from his body in a wave— _not a fireball, please that would be really hard to explain to the cops—_and pulse toward Crystal Robin’s glass of Dr. Pepper. 

The whole thing took maybe three seconds, but Jesus, Brian feels like he sat through a horror movie climax and came out the other side.

Crystal Robin takes a sip, then _drops _his glass onto the table. It doesn’t shatter, small miracles, but Dr. Pepper spills all over his Admiral’s Feast. “Hot!” he says, fanning at his mouth, squirming out of the way of the dripping liquid. “My Peppy!” And sure enough, the Dr. Pepper is steaming from a puddle that’s working its way toward the middle of the table.

Pat guffaws his big _Oh-Ho! _laugh as he takes another bite of shrimp. The sound is infectious, and Brian feels himself smiling despite himself. Pat drapes his arm over Brian’s shoulder and pulls him closer into a half-hug. “That’s my baby!” Pat crows as Brian elbows him in the side. 

“Ah, I was _hoping _you’d do a witch’s trick too!” Crystal Thymothy says, grinning and shaking his hair. “Well done, young Brian, you’ve bested Crystal Robin in a battle of wits!”

_Did I_? Brian thinks wildly, but he’s certainly not going to say anything. 

Crystal Thymothy waves his arm quickly and cleans up Crystal Robin’s whole situation before Joy can spot it and come over with a rag or something. Crystal Robin shakes out his hands, then picks up one of his remaining dry Walt’s Favorite Shrimp. He goes to eat it, then pauses before extending it out to Brian. 

“Well played,” Crystal Robin says with a smile. Brian doesn’t know what the _fuck _is going on, but he accepts the shrimp and takes a big ol’ bite out of it.

It tastes okay. But it also tastes like _victory_.

“Brian’s one of the funniest people I know,” Pat continues, squeezing Brian’s shoulder one more time before letting him go. “You should have seen his Week in Revue videos. He’d write a new song every week about gaming industry news, and, hah, actually make them funny. There was a whole side plot and background characters and everything.”

Brian feels his face heating up. He’d honestly almost forgotten Week in Revue even happened. Polygon moves so fast, and it’s been a couple months since he last filmed one. 

But that Pat could still readily call them to mind, and not only that, but wanted to highlight something that was Brian’s baby? It makes Brian’s tummy fizz like warm Dr. Pepper.

As Brian tucks into his pasta, Pat starts explaining the lore of the Please Retweet / Griffin’s Amiibo Corner crossover, which seems to fascinate Crystal Thymothy even though Brian still doesn’t quite understand it. But Pat had asked for help, and Brian had jumped, glue stick in hand, ready to do battle for Pat in whatever way he asked.

“So, he’d just put them in his mouth?” Crystal Thymothy asks slowly—and Brian smiles and lets himself tune out a bit. Pat’s got this now, they’re in good hands.

——

Pat offers to pay for the table’s bill when the times comes, to which both Crystals protest immediately and vehemently. “Why, certainly not, Patrick,” Crystal Robin says. He tries to snatch the bill out of Pat’s hand with two nimble fingers. “We invited you out, after all.”

“Yes, but you’re my guests,” Pat says, pulling the bill back toward his chest. “Really, it’s the _least _I could do.”

Privately, Brian thinks there are _many _less things that Pat could do, but there’s an Intricate Family Ritual going on. He’s just relieved that the attention’s off him and he can fiddle with his phone for something to do with his hands.

“Well, if you insist,” Crystal Thymothy says, smiling that wide, terrible smile again. He gives up fairly easily. “You know, you’re so grown up now, dear Patrick.”

“I’m thirty,” Pat grumbles, fishing his wallet out of his pocket.

“Practically an old man compared to me,” Brian offers.

Pat clutches at his chest, wounded, as he slides his card into the holder. “Really robbing the witch cradle,” he says.

“Absolute octogenarian mayhem,” Brian replies, to which Pat laughs and rubs at Brian’s shoulder.

“It’s always lovely to see bonds between new witches and familiars,” Crystal Thymothy says, leaning his chin on his palms. “The way you really start finishing each other’s—“

“Sandwiches,” Crystal Robin says, laughing. “Oh, we love your muggle movie _Frozen_.”

“_Yes_,” Brian says, dragging the word out to five freakin’ syllables. He tries not to spring apart from Pat like a teenager caught making out by their parents, but he does roll his shoulder out from under Pat’s grip. Stupid, stupid. “I was, hah, a fan of Pat’s work before I started at Polygon, and I’m even more of a fan now that I get to work more closely with him.” And then, turning on that megawatt smile, “But I’m sure I don’t have to tell y’all how special he is.”

Pat starts to stutter a rebuttal, but for once Brian’s glad for Crystal Thymothy’s penchant for crosstalk.

“Of course, of course!” he says, placing two of his shrimp in a Styrofoam box. “We just want what’s best for Patrick. That which would allow him to _thrive _and _blossom_, as it were. And I assumed, dear boy, that it would be best if he came back to Maine with us!”

“But I’d be miserable there,” Pat says firmly. Brian is _so_ proud of him. “My life’s in New York.” And he—_oh_—he reaches out and grabs Brian’s hand, smiling. “My witch is in New York.”

Crystal Thymothy looks over them both with a shrewd, all-knowing, magickal eye, and Brian feels himself break out into a cold sweat. A thousand years pass, but finally Crystal Thymothy nods and smiles, reaching across the table to rest his hand on Pat’s forearm. “I’ll tell your mother that you’ve settled in quite nicely here. Put down some roots and all that.”

Crystal Robin guffaws, clapping Crystal Thymothy on the back. “That was a good one! Even better than when you practiced it earlier.”

Pat turns his shoulders in Crystal Thymothy’s hold and morphs the weird arm-hug into a handshake. “Thank you, Crystal,” he says. And then he adds with a smile, “You can tell her that I’ll be home for Christmas this year, too.”

“Oh, marvelous!”  
“Oh, stupendous!”

“She’ll be _so _happy you’re coming back for Yule,” Crystal Thymothy says as Pat signs the check, adding what Brian hopes is the largest tip Joy’s ever received in her entire life. “And shall we—hmm?—shall we be expecting _both _of you?”

Brian’s face freezes. He’s supposed to quip something about holiday travel and the Realms of Magick being so backed up that time of year, funny-man Brian ready with a joke, but he _can’t_. 

So far, of all the lies he’s told today, this is the one that cracks his heart.

Christmas with Pat’s family and next Christmas with the Gilbert crew, Pat giddy that there’s good enough weather to porch-sit and drink mojitos. Pat teaching Brian’s nieces and nephews how to fly on broomsticks in the front yard, and maybe even Brian if he plays his cards right. It scratches deep in his chest, an ache he can’t touch or soothe or magic away, being exactly what Pat had needed in this moment and still not being enough.

Brian’s quiet for longer than social graces would allow, and Pat has a curious look on his face, one that’s maybe about to ask, _are you all right_? So he unsticks his tongue from the room of his mouth, digs his fingernails into the soft skin of his waist. “We’ll have to see, of course! I’d previously made other plans, but,” he adds, “this guy’s pretty convincing!”

Pat closes his mouth and reaches his hand out for Brian’s thigh, but Brian’s already halfway out of the booth, not bolting out the door, but not-not doing that.

—-

“We sincerely hope you’ll make it Brian,” Crystal Thymothy says, when they reach the mouth of the alley. “This has been a delight. Thank you for taking care of our Patrick.”

“Yes,” Brian agrees. “An absolute delight. So—lovely—to meet you. And really, Pat’s the one who takes care of me.” 

That gets a brilliant, terrifying smile as Crystal Thymothy swirls his cloak and heads toward Pat.

Crystal Robin grabs Brian’s clammy hand and—well, he doesn’t _shake _it, he just sort of. Props it up. Aloft. “I support you in your magical endeavors,” Crystal Robin says.

“Um,” Brian says, moving his hand back. “You uh. Too.”

That was apparently the correct answer. Crystal Robin nods solemnly and steps back in line with his witch. 

“Well we must be going now,” Crystal Thymothy says. “We can’t miss tonight’s episode of _Survivor_.” He throws open his cloak and lets it billow in an artificial wind as he digs around in the pocket of his blazer until, “A ha!”

Crystal Thymothy pulls _something _out of his cloak, Brian can’t see what it is, but it explodes like a flash bang with a light that pulsates through the alley in the exact opposite of _discreet_. When the light clears, there’s a single top hat lying on its side in the middle of the ground.

Crystal Robin picks up the hat and holds it away from his body, the underside toward his chest like he’s about to start a Fosse routine. But then Crystal Thymothy—_christ’s sake_—pulls a rabbit out of the hat and—_oh god body horror oh god—_passes the hat over himself and Crystal Robin until they disappear into it and out of sight. The hat folds in on itself like a black hole until it’s gone and there’s nothing in the alley save the rabbit.

“Oh my god,” Brian says, staring at the rabbit as it rounds the corner into a densely-packed tourist area of Manhattan. “Oh my _god_. They’re gone.”

“They’re gone,” Pat agrees.

“We did it?” Brian can scarcely believe it, but. The proof is in the pudding.

“I’m free!” Pat says dryly, shaking out the wiggles from his limbs. 

Brian bends over, his palms on his thighs, just breathing. He feels _winded_, his cloak trapped between his legs like a wedgie. “Pat, good lord that was. _Hoo_.”

“I am so sorry,” Pat says, rubbing his hands over his face, dragging them down his cheeks. He leans over and mirrors Brian’s position, both of them too tired to move. “That was even worse th- no, you know what? That was as awful as I expected it to be.”

Brian laughs wetly. “Now what, Patrick? Now that we’ve saved the day, the end credits have rolled, et cetera.”

Pat exhales. “I want to celebrate our job well done with a case of shitty beer, but like, Jesus all I want is a bath and a nap. And then maybe a beer,” Pat adds, wiping his forehead. His shoulders slump, but he looks the most relaxed Brian’s seen in months, seems like. “Magic is exhausting, Brian.”

“Magic _is _exhausting, Pat!”

——

By the grace of the Realms of Magick alone they manage to snag two seats next to each other on the train. Pat closes his eyes and rests his head against the wall. Brian mindlessly scrolls social media just for something to do with his fidgety hands. Occasionally, one of them will blurt out, _Did you hear the little delighted noises he made every time he ate a shrimp?_ or _Oh my god, when the waitress asked if we wanted to see the dessert menu I thought I was gonna die. _but other than that it’s quiet and as peaceful as a train could be with someone doing flips at the other end of the car.

They’re two stops from Pat’s place before Brian realizes that, oopsie-daisy, he’d just _assumed _they’d both go back to Pat’s place. Even though there isn’t strictly a reason to. 

Except.

Brian feels like he could simultaneously like he could sleep for twelve hours and also punch a jet out of the sky. He’s brimming with magical energy, and Pat doesn’t have to move back to Maine, and it’s been the most exhilarating and terrifying 48 hours of his life. So maybe Brian _will _encroach on Pat’s hospitality a little longer for a debrief and a beer.

Besides, Pat hadn’t said anything odd about Brian coming home with him. And when they reach the front door to the building, Pat unlocks the door and doesn’t bother turning around, just assumes that Brian’s coming up behind, which, okay. Maybe Pat’s not ready for it to end either.

Or maybe he’s just being nice? Maybe he doesn’t want Brian to come over but feels like he needs to. Pat probably wants to be alone after spending the last few days attached at the hip. 

Maybe Pat’s gonna fill out his Tinder profile, or whatever the witch-and-mandragora matching app would be. Seeking Edible Arrangements. He’ll still need a witch soon, he said so himself. In search of a mature witch who knows more than two spells and doesn’t live with two roommates, who can be exactly what Pat needs without working so damn hard. Someone who— 

Brian bumps into Pat’s back, huffs a laugh at himself when he sees they’re at Pat’s door. Oh. They’re here.

Pat turns around and holds out his arm to help Brian right himself. “Slow down, Speed Racer,” he says, keeping his hand in place until Brian feels steady. 

Brian prides himself in his ability to read people, figure out what makes them tick like a carnival psychic, but Pat is utterly unreadable, a blank slate. Just a strange expression that’s ticking some of the boxes for _hopeful _and others for _pained_. 

“I thought—hah, um—did you want to come in?” Pat asks. He rubs the back of his neck. Brian can feel himself staring.

_Does _Brian want to come in? Is Pat just saying that or is he saying it with some intent? Will it be chill, or will a round of Mario Kart and a radler make Brian spill his fucking guts about how —maybe, actually, he could be Pat’s witch—haha just kidding . . . unless?

Pat’s gaze drops to Brian’s lips. It does, Brian’s sure of it. Only for the briefest second, but Brian’s never paid closer attention to Pat’s face in his _entire life_. 

His breath catches, stuck still in his throat. Have they—oh—have they been doing the _will we, won’t we _goodnight-kiss dance? It’s been a long time since Brian’s done that particular number, but he remembers the steps fairly well. 

Brian’s heart pounds against his ribcage. He’s sure his mouth is doing something stupid, but his voice is quiet when he asks, “Pat, do witches always fall in love with their familiars?”

Pat licks his bottom lip and gazes off toward the other side of the hallway. “Not always,” he responds, equally soft. “But sometimes.”

“I—” 

“Did you—want to come in?” Pat repeats, shifting his weight, looking at Brian again. “You don’t—I just thought you might—” And then he trails off, and Brian’s still staring, wide-eyed like an ingenue, and Pat’s staring right back.

“I—yeah,” Brian decides, exhaling. “Yeah, let’s. Sure, Pat Gill.”

Pat grins and slumps against the doorframe, closes his eyes in a long, slow blink before he opens them again. “Great, okay let me just—”

And then Pat winces and grabs at his stomach, the fingers of both hands clenched around his belly. “Fuck,” he curses, the air hissing out from between his gritted teeth.

Brian startles and takes a step back. “Wh—are you okay?”

Pat squinches his eyes shut and rides out the pain, then laughs and starts to push himself off the wall, his eyes still closed. “Probably just the shrimp,” Pat says weakly. “More like Walt’s Food Poisoning Shrimp, I—”

He falls forward onto the ground, managing to barely catch himself on outstretched palms and knees on the floor.

“_Patrick!”_

“Okay, maybe not the shrimp,” Pat says, pained. When he opens his eyes, they’re bloodshot and terrible, and as he gets up on one knee, he sways and lists dangerously forward again. 

Brian rushes over to steady Pat’s shoulder, but he’s practically dead weight clutching to Brian’s arm. Pat’s stomach makes a terrible crackling noise, and his skin feels ashen and dry, and—Oh no. Oh no no no _no_.

“Too much magic—overdid it, I think,” Pat mumbles. “Tapped dry.”

A floor below, one of the doors opens and someone laughs on the phone as they clomp down the stairs. There’s too much—“We gotta get you inside,” Brain says, his throat clenching. He fumbles for Pat’s keys, which go flying to the floor. “C’mon, Pat I—help me out, one more second, please I—”

Pat slides the keys toward Brian’s knee and Brian jams them in the general direction of the doorknob, eyes not leaving Pat’s gray face. It takes a few passes, but the key finally connects, and Brian shoves the door open with his shoulder. He gets Pat under his armpit and half-carries, half-drags him through the archway and onto the floor of the living room.

The door slams, the Witch’s Bells on the door rattling and jangling behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any recognizable dialogue is pulled and adapted from Gill and Gilbert episode 14. Thanks for sticking with me on this story! I'm sorry for rewarding your patience with a cliffhanger. <3


	6. Part 3 - 2/2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's that? It's been almost a full calendar year since I started this fic, and we're finally on the penultimate chapter?? You truly love to see it. If you think you recognize the beginning of this chapter: you do. But now the whole thing is here as well!
> 
> Thanks to segmentcalled for being patient as I deliver this gift like a Charles Dickens serialized novel, and thanks to wildcopy for the fine-toothed comb of a beta!

They don’t make it farther than the couch. In fact, they don’t make it _ on _ the couch. Brian drags Pat as far as the base and props him up, one of Pat’s elbows slung over the armrest, his other elbow propped on his knee. Pat lists sideways and Brian doesn’t move fast enough to catch Pat’s head as it lolls sideways and presses against the armrest, his glasses knocked askew. He can’t hoist Pat up either, Pat’s long body refusing to fight gravity just this once. So Brian goes with him, sinks to the floor slumped half onto Pat’s chest.

“Okay!” Brian says, though even to his own ears it sounds the farthest thing from _ okay_. He staggers to his feet, sets one foot wide, the rest of his body loping behind. “Okay, it’s fine, just—hah—you need s’more blood, I can do that.”

“Brian—”

“Got one-point-five _ gallons _ of the stuff." The kitchen’s farther than he remembers, miles and miles away from Pat’s groaning body. Brian’s ripping drawers open, wood scraping against wood as cabinets creak and give up their contents. Pot holders, spatulas, can opener, no, no, no. “Learned that in Anatomy. One-point-five gallons a’ _ juice _ in somebody. I was gonna be a brain surgeon.”

“Brian.”

“Can you believe _ that_, Pat Gill? _ This _ chucklefuck? All up in your _ brain_?” The knives are two drawers over from the left; he grabs the first handle, one of the big boys for chopping tomatoes. Sharp enough. He whirls around again, slams the drawer closed with his hips, ow, just—gotta find some paper towels, hah— “No thank you, can’t even play _ Surgeon Simulator _ now without getting the _ ollllll’ _ heeby jeebys. Though—”

“_Brian! _”

Brian stops in his tracks, the momentum rocking him forward onto his tippy toes before he jerks backward onto his heels. Pat’s looking at him, and he’s—

Tired. 

No. _ Resigned_.

“That’s not going to work,” Pat says softly. The knife drops from Brian’s fingers. It doesn’t _ clatter _ so much as _ plunk _on the floor. “Used a lot of magic to make—” He gestures vaguely at Brian. 

Last night, this morning, dinner, all the times Brian leaned on Pat for strength, stupid, _ stupid_. He’d done this to Pat. It’s all his _ fault _. Well. If Brian said that out loud, Pat would refute it. But Brian doesn’t want to hear that right now.

“Need a lot of magic back,” Pat explains. His eyes slip closed. 

Brian’s there in a heartbeat, three big steps and he’s _ there_. Pat barely twitches when Brian grabs Pat’s old water cup from its spot next to the couch and holds it to his lips. 

“God, this form’s shit as fuck to hold right now,” Pat groans. He turns his head after one tiny sip. “I gotta—_not _. For a bit. Call Simone, she’ll—big ol’ transfusion or- or something, I don’t know—” He trails off, chin dipping to his chest. 

“What?” Brian’s voice quivers. “Where are you going?” He reaches out to touch Pat’s face, adjust his hair, feel his temperature—Brian’s honestly not sure, but his fingers stretch toward Pat like grasping for a beautiful shell sticking out of the sand.

Before he can make contact, Pat darts his hand up and grabs Brian by the wrist and _ squeezes_, what the—

“Pat, you’re—_ow_, fuck you’re _ hurting _ me.”

“Don’t.” Pat rasps. His eyes are wide, clear, focused, scared. He clears his throat. “Not leaving. If you— if you _ think _ you can’t handle this, please leave. Won’t hold it against you.”

“Never,” Brian promises, sure as he’s ever been. He twists his wrist in Pat’s hold and grabs Pat’s hand, sweaty palm to sweaty palm. Fuck, there’s a frog in his throat and a pond in his eyeballs. 

“Go photosynthesize or whatever,” Brian chokes out, his lips wobbly. “I’ll be here when you get your HP back.”

Pat smiles, wry and beautiful, and he breathes deep, and he _ shimmers_.

It’s a subtle glow at first, like the slick sheen of a _ Twilight _vampire, but the glimmer is distracting enough that Brian doesn’t catch at first when Pat’s leg twists into an unnatural angle. But then it’s impossible to ignore. Pat’s foot bends around at the ankle once, twice, then corkscrews up the rest of Pat’s leg like a wet towel being wrung out. The long length of him spins into something wholly unpleasant, the thick roots of his leg thunking rhythmically on the floor growing stranger and more inhuman. Pat’s shoes slip off what used to be his feet as roots branch outward and down along the floorboards. One root finds a crack in the floor and burrows into it, dragging the plank up with a cloud of dust.

Smaller white roots break off the larger ones, then smaller still, little hairs stretching out from the trunk of Pat’s body. Brian has to look away when Pat’s legs shudder and twist at his pelvis, wincing for the sound of shattered hips that never come. There isn’t any noise other than the creaking of wood and the hushed susurrations of leaves. When Brian looks back, there _ are _leaves where once Pat had hair, a large, shimmery stalk of leaves that spring up off his head and fold backward over the couch cushion. The floorboards groan, and Pat’s arms twist then plant themselves into the floor, and Brian has to close his eyes again when the movement gets to Pat’s neck.

There’s a terrible crack, and a low grunt, and then there aren’t any sounds except for leaves rustling in the wind. The groaning floor settles like a ship on the ocean, and Brian can finally exhale the tight breath in his chest. 

Pat has flowers, which isn’t something Brian had considered before, but there they are: a gathering of star-shaped purple flowers under the leaves, almost like Pat had woven a crown for himself, except that Brian’s sure they’re connected to Pat’s head. But almost as quickly as they open toward the window, several of them complete the process in fast-motion, then shrivel, then fall to the ground. And still Pat doesn’t move, the gnarled knots of his face remaining still and silent. 

Another flower falls. Brian’s not a mandrake expert, but he’s killed enough plants in his lifetime. He gets the impression that they’re not supposed to do that.

“Patrick?

Nothing. Neither a comforting sway of leaves, nor an outstretched root. Brian scrubs his hand over his eyes. Charles meows.

_ Call Simone_, right.

He pulls his phone from his pocket and kneels next to what would be Pat’s left arm. He wants to touch, but it’s the first time he’s ever thought that his touch might be unwelcome. So he just carefully traces one fingertip along the gnarled twist of Pat’s wrist. It’s warm, and earthy, and Brian wants to bury his fingers in rich, sun-warmed soil, feel the abundance of life, and growth, and death, and decay, all cycled through the whorls of his fingerprints.

Simone picks up after two rings. “This better be g—” she says, by way of greeting, but Brian cuts her off before she can get to a double entendre.

“It’s Pat, he’s—I know about, all of it,” Brian says, laughing, a bit hysterically. “He’s in a pretty bad way, Simone.”

Simone inhales sharply, and Brian can imagine her moving out of a casual post, resting her elbows on a table. “What do you mean, _ a bad way_?”

“Well, he has _ leaves _ now,” Brian says as he rubs a purple petal between his thumb and finger. It feels like velvet. “I don’t think he has much time,” Brian adds, his voice cracking. “Said he needed a—a transfusion or something, I don’t know, he—he told me to call you before he was, hah, a plant.”

Another petal falls, like the _ Beauty and the Beast _ rose. Of all the frickin’ movies for Brian to be living, he’d always thought it’d be _ Mulan _.

Charles _mrows _ and rubs against one of Pat’s roots, his forehead scrubbing up and down like he’s searching for pets. But when Brian reaches out to touch him, Charles slips away and hops up to the window ledge.

“_Brian_,” Simone says sharply, and Brian gets the impression it’s not the first time she’s said his name. 

“Yeah?”

“Brian, I’m—” Simone says, and Brian can tell by her tone of voice that it’s not _ okay _. “Jenna and I are in Greenport, took the Jitney out here and I’m. We’re like four hours, I won’t—”

_ I won’t be there in time_.

Brian lets out a sob before he can help it. He’s not sure he _ wants _ to help it. “Simone, what do I—” He breaks off. “It’s _ Pat_,” he finishes helplessly.

“You’re, jesus okay, you’re gonna have to stabilize him until I get back,” Simone says. Jenna says something in the background, but Brian can’t make out whatever question she throws Simone’s way.

“Stabilize him?”

“I can help, just tell me what book you’re on,” Simone says.

Brian laughs, just a manic squeal of a laugh, fucking shit geez louise mother fuck— “_Book_? I’ve only been, hah, doing this for like twenty-four hours.”

Simone’s answering laugh could peel paint off Pat’s shitty walls. “Sweet lord, okay. You’re just. Wow, _ really _ ? _ No _ books, really?”

“_Simone_.”

She takes a deep breath, harsh down the phone line, and Brian finds himself matching her breath. His is tied tight in a bow. She takes another, and another. “Okay,” Simone says finally, after what feels like a decade. “Okay, if you can give Pat enough power he should be able to keep a steady hold on his form. But not too much, or it’ll kill both of you.

Brian uses his free hand to wipe his soggy cheek. “Easy-peasy,” he quips. His throat feels like sandpaper.

“Atta-boy,” Simone encourages, the kind of pep talk you give someone who you know isn’t coming back from the front lines. “You need to find a conduit, Brian,” she says. “Something to boost your power and channel it so Pat can soak it up.”

“Pat said I could.” Brian hiccups. “Pat said I could set shit on fire.”

“Yeah that’s what we _ don’t _want to happen,” Simone says pointedly. “You could also drain enough of your own energy that you freeze to death on the spot.”

Brian’s head pounds. “Will this—is there any chance this will go right?”

“Yes,” Simone promises. She’d probably cross her heart, if she could. “You’ve at least seen movies, they’re not _ that _wrong. Make a salt circle around yourself so if you blow yourself up you won’t also wipe out half of Brooklyn.”

“Not helping,” Brian grits out. 

“_I know_,” Simone snips. Brian imagines she’s rubbing at her temples, now. “Honestly don’t even _ think _about fire, like, at all right now.”

“Then—”

“Life,” Simone cuts him off. “Soul, Heart, whatever you wanna call it. Mana and shit.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Brian whispers.

“I know,” Simone soothes. “But you’re going to have to try.”

She adds, “I’ll send word to the rest of my coven, see if anyone could come help you out, but I think—I’ve never seen him like that, but I know it’s not good.”

“I’ll let you go,” Brian says shakily.

“I’m right there with you,” Simone says, “and if broomsticks weren’t just a metaphor for jerkin’ it while blitzed, I’d fly over there in a heartbeat.”

“Wh-”

“Go,” Simone urges. “I love you to death, but I will not forgive you if you kill him. Or yourself.” And then she hangs up, and Brian feels well and truly alone.

Brian gives himself one eight-count before he lurches to his feet and bumbles into the kitchen. There’s a giant container of salt next to Pat’s stove. It’s probably just regular ol’ salt for cooking or maybe for throwing on grease fires, but Brian hopes that’s also the kind of salt that can contain magic spells. Since he doesn’t have a _ textbook, apparently _ to check that in. Brian’s generous with his pour, uses all the salt (“Sorry, Patrick, it’s bad for your heart.”) to make a giant circle ringing around the entire couch and Pat’s root system, with enough space for Brian to step inside too.

Charles rubs his body against one of Pat’s hand roots, then pads out of the circle and hops onto the windowsill. Brian stares at him for a long moment, but if Charles possesses humanlike sentience, he’s doing a great job of pretending to be a cat—he starts licking his butt, and almost falls out of the windowsill.

_ Conduit, conduit_. Yesterday they’d used that grain alcohol to enhance the magical flavors of the herbs. Stronger than water, Pat had said. But Pat’s shelf is missing anything helpfully labeled, “for when you almost kill your mandragora friend.” Brian grabs the moonshine from the cabinet and uncorks the lid, takes a big whiff of the turpentine inside. He could maybe dump it on himself, or on Pat? But that doesn’t seem good, necessarily, like it’d be a _ good _idea to soak a plant’s roots in alcohol. He could tip it into Pat’s mouth like whiskey in an old-timey movie before they had anesthesia, but Pat doesn’t even _ have _a mouth, just a gnarled root with a scrape to the right of his chin.

Brian had called that patch _ distinguished_, once, and tried not to take it personally when Pat showed up on Monday morning clean-shaven and twitchy.

Not the time. Think, think _ motherfucker think_. Bold and brassy. Show choir lead. Teacher’s pet, show-stopper, show-stealer, fuck.

It’s hard for Brian to turn on his megawatt intensity after so many times getting burned. Pat’s usually there like a port in the storm, a slightly more put-together adult who says things like _ circle up _ but also throws out, _ what if at the end of the stream one of us has to drink the punishment cup_? But Brian had read some of the comments from those early streams, before he knew the comment section and stream chat weren’t _ for _ him anymore. They talked about his doe eyes, how he was hanging off Patrick and beaming love rays at him—and those hurt most of all because those people were right. 

So Brian had toned it down, taken small and wonderful personal pleasure in Pat giving Brian energy rather than taking it away. Calming Brian down from a panic attack before their first stream. Setting up the cams for whatever wacky Gill and Gilbert idea Brian had next. Bumping his shoulder at the Times Square Red Lobster.

He takes a deep breath. Plenty of things make Pat’s cheeks glow after comin’ ‘round the bend of 2017, and it’s those things that Brian pictures. The way Pat’s eyes light up when he gets the perfect ratio of cream (very little) to coffee (helluva lot) from the break room Keurig. How hard he laughs when Simone makes a dirty joke so Pat doesn’t have to. The friendly-smug way Pat gets when Brian loses at Gill and Gilbert. How happy Pat looks when Brian asks for advice in slack using a WWE gif, or when Brian shoots Pat jokes to run by him first. When Brian laughs so hard when they’re out drinking that he burps some of it up when Pat claps on his back. When Brian tells stories from his show choir days because he knows it’ll make Pat genuinely interested and also horrified. When Brian gives constructive feedback on Pat’s scripts, when Brian. When Brian.

And the warmth gathering in Brian’s chest—that beautiful prickly warmth—doesn’t feel like a fire, but it feels _right_. Brian follows that trail, thinks of other things that light up Pat’s eyes 

Brian takes a swig of the grain alcohol, clamping his fingers over his nose so he doesn’t spit it right out again. He forces his throat to stop spasming and waits until the liquid is definitely _ down _ before moving his hand. He drags the bottle with him back to the couch. Pat hasn’t moved, hah, he’s really _ rooted _—and that’s a joke Pat would love if Pat could hear it, if the situation was even one tick less dangerous. Brian settles his hand on where Pat’s shoulder would be, licks at the tacky-fire taste on the roof of his mouth, and closes his eyes.

The well of his magic is much closer, like wading into the shallow end of a warm pool, but almost before he’s even tried it Brian knows in his bones that it’s not going to work. His magic doesn’t resonate in the space, just thuds dully against the blackness around him. But he tries—lord, does he try. He tastes the alcohol, and feels his magic, and thinks every good thought he’s ever had about Pat Gill being warm and alive and human.

Nothing happens. The chord fades, and if it does anything, it doesn’t make enough of a dent for Brian to notice. Pat’s leaves don’t rustle. He’s silent, and still, and Brian lurches forward onto his palms.

“Mother_ fucker_,” Brian snarls. He wrenches the bottle to his mouth and takes another swig, and follows the burn down his throat to the center of himself. But it’s not any better—when Brian plucks the string of his magic, the discordant note that comes out is painful and harsh, and Brian chokes on it as it pulls him back out of himself. Brian drops back onto his sitbones and tucks his knees into his eyes, his arms wrapped around his shins. Conduit, conduit, just fucking _ think _. Not alcohol, and not Charles, and there’s not—

“Pat,” Brian says softly, licking his lips. He traces one finger over the buckling floorboards, his nail catching on a tiny white root. “Pat I don’t know how to help you,” Brian chokes out. “I don’t know, and I want to—I _ need to _help you.” 

Pat’s the one running support for Brian. Always. Even when Pat’s playing a tank. He’s always a bit of a healer, for Brian. And Brian knows he’s one knife short of a silverware drawer if he’s using video game metaphors for his friendship with Pat. For his Pat.

“C’mon, where’s my—fucking Hermione to save my stupid ass,” Brian says, getting to his feet again. “You’re supposed to be my Hermione, _ Pat_.” He spins, looking for anything in the room that might help, some place Pat might hide a little chest with a _ break here in case of mandragora _vial.

Brian spins again, and the wide gesticulation causes his fingertips to bump into Charles on his perch. Charlie _ mrows _ sadly, and even though Brian says a soft “no, it’s okay,” Charlie hops down anyway, letting the too-bright streetlight—New York, baybee!—blast in through the window without his butt in the way. It beams in like headlights, the light refracting off something shiny in the corner of Brian’s eye, almost disorienting in its intensity. Brian squints to figure out what’s causing it, something over the fireplace—no, on the.

Oh, for the love of Christ.

Brian snatches the quartz off the fucking _ mantle _ , a conduit as blaring as the ambulance siren whizzing down Pat’s avenue. It’s white and milky and _ massive _, taking two hands for Brian to hold it properly, carefully. It’s warm, too, which Brian hysterically thinks of as “good level design,” as he careens back to the salt circle. Brian would laugh hysterically if he wasn’t scrambling to the circle, knocking over half of Pat’s apartment to get there.

“Don’t worry, Pat Gill,” Brian says, closing his eyes. “I’ve got Chekhov’s fucking gun.”

_ I hope he heard that_, Brian thinks, as he sinks into himself. _ Hate to lose it. _

The well inside Brian _ burns _, a cascade of heat and light and fire that licks Brian’s incorporeal skin but doesn’t scald. It’s nice, like a hot tub when it’s freezing outside, like the relief of a campfire to his chilled bones, like the way Brian had felt after his first week at Polygon, when he’d finally taken a second to breathe and his heart had felt so, so full.

His toe brushes against Pat’s leg, and like it’s dulled through layers of insulation, Brian feels the tip of the crystal pointing toward Brian’s heart. Lodged in the center of his chest, because that’s where it had desired most.

_ Please_, Brain says, and he’s not sure if it’s from his real mouth or his theoretical one. _ I need to help my friend_. The crystal hums, droning like a thousand bees, and Brian locks his arms—his real ones, this time_—_to keep it steady. _ He’s, Pat’s sick, and he’s helped me so much, and I’m. Please cut me some slack? Universe? _ Brian takes a deep breath and drops deeper inside himself. _ I’m so—he’s just so good. _

The point of the crystal presses harder into his chest, and inside himself Brian drops to his knees in supplication in the midst of his id, or God, or whatever or whoever he’s begging.

_ I love him_, Brian gasps, rolling up onto his toes. And his voice is everywhere, and nowhere, filling all the cracks and lines and staves in between. _ I love him, and he can’t die ‘cause that would be a _ real shitty spot _ to end our story, universe_. _ Did ya, hah, even think about that? Ending before the falling action, who _does _that?_

There’s a great and terrible pause, like the mute button being depressed in his consciousness, and Brian daren’t even breathe to break the silence.

_ But also thanks in advance_, he thinks quickly. _ You’re the best, LYLAS, and I’m sure you know what you’re doing. All-knowing and whatnot. _

It’s definitely nothing, less than nothing, this whole night is a dream and Brian got a concussion hauling Pat’s bony body into the door, or he's been dead for ten years, or—

But he feels—he _ feels_—the universe smile, and sigh, as Brian lets the energy flow from the ground, to the crystal, to his body. 

HHe places his free hand against Pat’s chest, and it’s like a gun goes off.

Brian holds on as long as he physically can, but somewhere between milliseconds and millenia he’s ricocheted backward. His shoulder strikes _ hard _ into a barrier that flashes on impact and then fades down to the salt on the ground. It halts his momentum like a car crash and he slumps to the floor with a muffled ache. Brian crunches into a ball, and his hand squeezes hard enough that the point of the crystal jams into his palm, cutting it open. Brian bleeds, he can feel his blood _outside_ himself, a wave of raw energy crashing and rolling over him like a tempest. 

“Pat,” Brian sobs out, getting himself back onto all fours. His hands brush on Pat’s ankles, Pat must have moved a bit during the blast too. He’s slumped over, the roots of his hands on the twists of his thighs, and there are more leaves, more petals, in a circle around him.

“_Pat_,” Brian repeats, his voice little more than a croak. He drops the crystal, which rolls until it knocks into the barrier and goes still as the grave, and crawls forward the two inches to Pat’s body. He looks and he. He tries to _ see. _

“Please tell me that—” Brian exhales. “Fuck, come _ on_, universe, _ please_.” 

He reaches out to cup what would be Pat’s cheek, the gnarled surface warm against his palm. The pressure stings against his scraped hand, and starts to burn. Brian goes to pull his hand away, but there’s another sting, then a poke, and when Brian finally wrenches his hand away he sees there’s a thorn on Pat’s cheek where there wasn’t before, like _Pat_ had poked him.

Pat _ poked _ him.

“Patrick?” Brian asks, incredulous.

The mandrake isn’t Pat—or rather, it _ is_, but also not yet—but there are definitely stubble-like thorns on his stupid, idiotic, ridiculously handsome, planty little face.

Then more of them pop up, then more, little nodules that sprout into white, mealy tendrils that grow and stretch and arc toward the sun before bending and wrapping Pat’s body like a cocoon. They spiral counter-clockwise, growing thicker as they coil until each wrap is larger than Brian’s arm, both arms together, perhaps. The tendrils climb down from Pat’s head, wrap him all the way from his crown to the base of his roots, until just the stem of his mandrake-rooted head peaks above the bindings.

“You uh. In there?” Brian asks. He hopes it’s not like a caterpillar thing. When he learned what caterpillars actually got up to inside their cocoons, he hadn’t been able to eat for like three days. If Pat’s not gonna be made of skin and bone, the least he could do is have a body made out of more than goop.

The crystal on the floor pulses with a deep, resonant sound that makes Brian’s molars ache and his right ear clog, and the smell of burning hair and fried eggs hits Brian’s nose and he doubles over from the intensity of it. But then it vanishes.

And Pat’s leaves rustle.

The cocoon _ cracks _down the middle with a paper-shred burst, and there’s. There’s Pat, leaning out, his hair sopping wet and his skin made out of human skin and his lower half still encased in tendrils, protecting his modesty like the Birth of Venus.

He looks up, his eyes blinking heavily, his head rocking on his neck like he’s a baby who hasn’t quite learned how to hold it up yet. It’s only seconds before Pat’s eyes connect on Brian, and it’s almost comical how still he goes. He doesn’t blink. _ Brian _ doesn’t blink. 

“You stayed,” Pat says, and his voice is dry and crisp like a first-fallen apple. 

“I stayed,” Brian repeats.

“You’ve—” Pat cuts himself off and shakes his head back and forth like a dog drying its fur. Wet dirt spills out around his hands, from his hair, and he coughs up what looks like a moss ball, which rolls across the floor and disappears down into the cracked floorboard.

_ There goes the security deposit_, Brian thinks feverishly as one of Pat’s floorboards cracks under the strain from his root.

Which is a wild thing to think, Brian knows it when he thinks it, but now that Pat has a face and isn’t actively dying, it seems, all of the endorphins hit Brian in one giant rush. The best xanny he’s ever had.

So he laughs, more hysterical than not, and plops down on his butt in the middle of a pile of dirt, because _ Pat still has a stem growing out of his head _.

“It’ll—” Pat’s voice croaks, but it sounds healthier than it has in weeks. “I’ll fall off in a day or two. Sorry, I—I know it’s weird.”

It is, in Brian’s estimation, the least weird thing that’s happened to him in forty-eight hours. But he still doesn’t know what to say about the fact that Pat has _ leaves _ on his _ head_, a handful of them that haven’t dried and fallen yet. 

The silence stretches on for an uncomfortable amount of time, and Pat hesitates, his hand clenching like he’d disappear back into the cocoon if he could. But Pat only gets half an inch before Brian reaches out to touch along the tendrils still holding Pat’s waist.

“_Daisy Head Maisy _-looking ass,” Brian says, wiping a single tear out of his eye.

Pat _ guffaws _ and bends in half to sweep Brian up into a standing hug, strong enough to crush Brian’s bones if Pat were capable of crushing anything at the moment.

“_Chekhov’s fucking gun_,” Pat quotes dryly, and Brian whacks him on the shoulder because Pat’s not dying now, he can do that now, even if he’s crying in a snotty, gross sort of way.

“Knew you could hear me,” Brian mumbles into his own shirtsleeve, wiping his nose in the process. “You turnipy fuck.”

“I heard everything,” Pat murmurs, and suddenly Brian realizes they’re very, very close.

Brian keeps his shoulders wide, his arms open, his hands gently placed over Pat’s forearms. So it’s like nothing complicated at all when Pat lists forward again to press his lips against the corner of Brian’s mouth.

It’s a weird sort of kiss, their first one. One where Brian is actively crying, and Pat is half-restrained by plants that are holding him back but also keeping him upright. But they make it work—_god, _ do they ever—as Brian tilts his head to align their mouths just so. The slide of Pat’s lips over Brian’s are so warm and smooth considering they were root a minute ago. But that earthyness is still there, when Brian lets his lips drop open for Pat’s questing tongue. It’s like petrichor, like freshly-cut grass, like something warm and spicy that Brian had assumed was aftershave but now, he’s sure, is something inherently Pat. 

Pat works a shoulder free from the roots so he can cup one damp hand against Brian’s cheek, and then things _ really _ take off. Pat deepens the kiss, his stubble scraping against Brian’s chin as he gets _ into it_, uses his whole head to get Brian to moan into his mouth, to bring them together in this way and all others, besides. 

The kiss crescendos until it’s forced to resolve, when Pat can’t hold the angle anymore and he has to break away and rest back into the cocoon again. He rubs at his neck, apparently still the same old man body despite the fresh skin and bones. The motion causes one of the last few purple flowers to drop out of Pat’s hair. Like it’s second nature, Pat plucks it off his bare shoulder and—_oh _—tucks it behind Brian’s ear.

“_Pat Gill_,” Brian says warmly, and he doesn’t have to say anything else for Pat to grin dopily back.

“Can you say it again?” Pat asks, and Brian smiles.

“Daisy Head M-_ mmph_.”

Pat parts from the kiss with a loud _ smack _and a fond roll of his eyes, so familiar and so new that Brian feels a little fizzy from it. Pat had been mostly-dead for only twenty minutes max, but that’s all the near-death experiences Brian wants to have for a lifetime.

“The other bit, I know,” Brian concedes. But before he can say it again, Pat darts in for another kiss.

“I love you too,” Pat says. His eyes are _ so _ crinkly, and the leaves on his head—_on his head— _quiver when he dips down to gather Brian’s lips between his own. They part again with another smack. “And,” Pat adds, “I’m glad the universe liked your chutzpah enough to give me the chance to freakin’ say it back.”

Brian wipes another mess of snot and tears into the collar of his shirt, gross. “Pat Gill, we have to plant _ so _many trees this weekend. Arbor Day comin’ early, motherfucker. I promised a lot of shit so you wouldn’t die on me.”

“I’m glad you did,” Pat says, grinning. He hasn’t _ stopped _grinning since his big stupid face popped out of his big stupid cocoon and kissed Brian senseless. Pat kisses him again, for good measure, like now that he’s let himself start it’d take nothing short of heaven and hell to get him to stop. 

“Gotta get back to standing on my own first,” Pat adds. “Might be awhile.” But he’s already starting to disentangle himself from the vines wrapped around his waist like a seatbelt.

“I’ll help ya,” Brian says, holding out his hand. 

And without a second’s hesitation, Pat takes it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I have laid up for thee, O my beloved](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26195647) by Anonymous 


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